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600 pieces of equipment, 1,000 workers and 2,500 miles of streets: How Philly clears its snow

Tackling a snow event is a vast and complicated system for the city of Philadelphia, requiring a revolving cast of roughly 600 pieces of equipment and more than 1,000 employees.

Roughly 600 pieces of equipment, like this dump truck pictured Jan. 24, 2026, at a Streets Department yard in North Philadelphia, were deployed to help clear and salt the city's roads.
Roughly 600 pieces of equipment, like this dump truck pictured Jan. 24, 2026, at a Streets Department yard in North Philadelphia, were deployed to help clear and salt the city's roads.Read moreMaggie Prosser

The action inside the gates of a Department of Streets yard in North Philadelphia hours before impending snow looks like a ballet.

An ensemble of tri-axle dump trucks wait in the wings (behind an orange traffic cone). Center stage (a salt dome), the excavator scoops up tons of rock salt in its jaws. The first truck makes its entrance and pirouettes (a three-point turn), while the excavator stretches its long arm, unloading heaps of salt into the truck bed. Then, a trumpet (the “beep” of a car horn) ushers the dump truck off (out through the yard’s gates).

This was the routine for hours at multiple city yards Saturday night into Sunday, and likely beyond, as Philadelphia confronted its biggest snowfall in five years. The sheer scale of snow — 7.4 inches at Philadelphia International Airport as of Sunday afternoon — combined with the threat of sleet and plummeting temperatures posed a challenge for municipal workers, who are responsible for brining, plowing, then salting more than 2,500 miles of roadways.

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“This is a matter of life and death in some cases if we don’t get this right,” Carlton Williams, director of the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, said of the city’s road operations at a news conference Sunday. “We’re fighting it continuously.”

Tackling this snow event is a vast and complicated system, requiring a revolving cast of roughly 600 pieces of equipment and more than 1,000 employees, including contractors, and people and vehicles — like compactor trash trucks with plows attached — pulled in from other departments, officials said. It also calls for some improv, moving and adjusting with the ever-changing weather. This dance is sometimes more akin to organized chaos than choreography.

The curtain call time was 10 p.m. Saturday at the North Philadelphia yard for crews assigned to 151 different routes on the primary thruways, like Broad Street. At 11 p.m., the residential fleet — which handles 133 routes on smaller secondary and tertiary roads — clocked in. More staff were scheduled to arrive at staggered times throughout the storm.

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There are roughly a hundred back-end staff working behind the curtain: They are the choreographers, tasked with managing crews, inputting data, monitoring street camera footage, and responding to phone calls or issues. They are in it for the long haul, prepared to spend days in front of a computer armed with spare clothes, a stockpile of food, caffeine, and personal hygiene products.

The drivers are assigned routes and vehicles, then fill up with salt — of which there were roughly 30,000 tons, or more than 66 million pounds, in storage Saturday night. The trucks leave the yard and typically head to the top of their route and await the OK to start plowing.

According to Williams, crews had been clearing since 5 a.m. Sunday. Snow must be expeditiously removed from the streets before salt can be spread. And with this storm, there was limited timing to get that done before the precipitation turned icy and whatever was on the ground froze. Just after noon, the snow was seemingly over, giving way to sleet.

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Officials also deployed “lifting operations” Sunday afternoon to scoop up large snow piles amassed in the densest neighborhoods and deposit them elsewhere. One option was a trailer-sized snow melting machine, which liquefies 135 tons of snow per hour

As of Sunday afternoon, most streets under the city’s responsibility had been recently plowed, a public streets department database showed. At about the same time, there were more than 20 public requests for plowing visible on Philly311’s online portal.

“We exercise patience,” Williams said, “I need our residents to exercise patience because this is a long, drawn-out storm.”