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Snow will be cleared in Moscow
On October 14, a "yellow" weather hazard level was declared in Moscow due to heavy snowfall; up to 15% of the monthly precipitation norm is expected in the city in one day. Meanwhile, the structures of the capital's mayor's office announced a tender for the loading, removal and disposal of snow from the city center. Accordingly, by the end of this year, 116,000 m3 of snow will be removed from the Central Administrative District (CAD), and about 890,000 m3 of snow over three years. Since August, city authorities have already announced 10 applications. It is expected that snow removal work by the end of 2026 will cost Moscow 4.5 billion rubles. This is not a record. In 2021, about 10 billion rubles were spent on these purposes.
A tender for the loading, removal and disposal of snow in the Central Administrative District of Moscow was announced by the City Hall structure of the State Budgetary Institution "Automobile Roads of the Central Administrative District". The construction company plans to remove about 116,000 ㎥ of snow from November 15 until the end of the year and 386,000 ㎥ in 2025 and 2026, respectively. The document states that the contractor must have at least 230 units of equipment, as well as clear the snow within 24 hours "after the end of the rain" ("every three hours, if there is no snowfall").
The mayor's office plans to use telemetry from GLONASS sensors to monitor the movement of contractors' dump trucks and "laser measuring devices" installed at snowmelt points to monitor "the actual amount of snow unloaded and removed by contractors."
The contract value (ensuring snow removal in the amount of 890 thousand cubic meters until the end of 2026) is 689.6 million rubles. Applications for participation in the competition are accepted until October 28.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government has announced a total of 10 tenders for snow removal and sanitation for 2024–2026, starting in August 2024. This includes five tenders for various areas of the Central Administrative District and work in five additional districts of Moscow, including cleaning the North-West Administrative District for 539.99 million rubles. The total contract value is about 4.5 billion rubles. This will likely not be the final price the city will pay for snow removal and sanitation over the next three years. For now, procurement lists are only active in half of the 12 agglomerations.
The city regularly holds tenders for snow removal and disposal, designed for two or three winter seasons at a time. Thus, in 2021, 25 competitions were held with a total value of about 10 billion rubles. (Cleaning is guaranteed from 2023 to 2024). The largest tender at that time was a tender for 3.1 billion rubles, announced by the state budget body Magistral in October 2021. According to the terms, a total of 21 million cubic meters of snow was supposed to be cleared and removed from 2022 to 2024. Kommersant (October 25, 2021).
On October 14, the weather risk in Moscow was declared at the "yellow" level due to low temperatures and snow. Forecasters predicted that about 15% of precipitation would fall on that day. According to RIA Novosti, the airports of the capital region were operating normally on October 14. However, Sheremetyevo urged passengers to take the weather into account and go to the airport early. At Domodedovo, the plane carrying Kommersant correspondents to Yekaterinburg was delayed by an hour and a half due to de-icing. Mikhail Leus, a senior specialist at the Phobos meteorological center, told Kommersant that no records were broken for the first snowfall on October 14.
"As far as I remember, last year the first snow fell on October 10. The average date for the first snow in Moscow in the 21st century is October 16. This is a fairly normal period of snowfall in the central European part of Russia. But it was not very frequent. "In fact, it was summer for four months, then two weeks of autumn, and then immediately winter," Mr. Leus said.
However, according to him, the snow in Moscow will melt by October 15, and by the weekend the daytime temperature in the capital will return to +10°C.