Strata snow removal in Richmond, where the ice arrives without the snow

Richmond’s winter problem is drainage, not depth

Richmond does not get the accumulation the North Shore does. What it gets is worse in a specific way: water with nowhere to go.

The city sits on flat delta ground, most of it at or barely above sea level. On a sloped property, meltwater from a cleared surface runs off. Here it does not. It stands where it melted — in the low spot of a drive aisle, at the foot of an entry step, across the width of a visitor stall — and when the temperature drops through zero that night, it becomes a sheet of clear ice over a surface that looks cleared.

That is the Richmond hazard: not a snowbank someone can see, but a transparent sheet on a surface that was properly ploughed eight hours earlier.

Ice with no snow at all

The second thing that catches Richmond strata out is that the worst mornings often follow nights with no precipitation.

Freezing fog rolls off the Fraser and the strait. Clear, still nights radiate heat away from paved surfaces until they sit below the air temperature. Either produces a glaze on walkways and drive aisles without a flake falling — and a contract that dispatches on snowfall accumulation simply does not send anyone.

This is why we treat de-icing as a separate service with its own trigger and its own rate rather than as something bundled into a plough visit. In a Richmond winter, most of the billable visits are de-icing. Some seasons nearly all of them are.

Bylaw 5870 includes Sundays

Richmond’s Traffic Control and Regulation Bylaw 5870 requires the owner or occupier of residential, commercial and industrial property to clear snow and ice from the sidewalk along the property line by 10:00am every day, Sundays included. The fine is $125.

For a strata corporation the duty runs to council. The frontage is often long on a Richmond townhouse development — these complexes tend to present a wide face to the street — and it is the one surface that is simultaneously the corporation’s responsibility and entirely outside its fence line.

Almost everything outside is common property

Richmond’s strata stock leans heavily toward low-rise townhouse developments rather than towers, and that changes the scope. In a tower, the corporation’s outdoor obligation is often a lobby approach and a ramp. In a townhouse complex it is the internal drive aisles, the visitor parking, the walkways between buildings, the entry steps to every unit, and the bylaw frontage.

That is a lot of surface, most of it hand-work rather than machine-work, and it is the reason a price quoted off a satellite outline of the whole parcel is usually wrong. We measure the surfaces actually serviced and price those.

What council should ask any contractor here

• Does de-icing dispatch on temperature, or only on snowfall? In Richmond this is the question that decides whether the contract works.
• What happens to the meltwater? A contractor who has not thought about standing water on flat ground has not thought about Richmond.
• What is the response window, in hours? Nobody else in this market publishes one.
• Is the salt inside the price? Ours is. In a freeze-thaw winter with many de-icing visits and little snow, an à-la-carte material charge is where a budget goes.

Put the address in and most Richmond properties get a measured price range on the next screen.