Windrow clearing in Oakville

The snow in a windrow has already been picked up, carried along a steel blade and packed down before it lands. Fresh snow on a driveway is light and mostly air. The ridge at the end of it is compacted, often mixed with road grit and whatever slush the pavement was carrying, and it has usually sat long enough to set. That is why a shovel that handles the rest of a driveway in twenty minutes stops dead at the ridge, and why a snowblower that clears the middle without complaining will bog down in it.

The part that catches people is the timing. You clear the driveway, you go to work, the road plow comes through at two in the afternoon and by the time you get home there is a fresh ridge across an otherwise clean driveway. Nobody is doing anything wrong; the road has to be cleared and the snow has to go somewhere. But it means the windrow is a second clearing that arrives hours after the first, and it is the one that is still there at seven the next morning when you are trying to leave.

Streets that get plowed early in a route see this first, and after back-to-back snowfalls they see it more than once.

The Town of Oakville operates a driveway windrow clearing program. It has its own registration window in the autumn, its own conditions, and its own thresholds for when the crews go out. If you are registered and it covers what you need, that is the cheaper route and we would say so.

The people who end up asking a contractor are the ones the program does not reach: households that missed the registration window, properties where the timing does not work, people who want the ridge gone before the program's own threshold is met, and anyone who would rather have the same contractor doing the driveway and the windrow in one visit. Check the town's program first. If it is not the answer for your property, this is.

The apron is the few metres where the driveway meets the road, and it is the part of a property most likely to be damaged in winter. The snow there is the densest, the surface underneath is often a different material from the rest of the drive, and there is frequently a lip or a gutter line the blade can catch. A contractor who clears windrows for a living knows to lift over that, and knows where the cleared snow can go so that the next plow pass does not put it straight back.

Where it goes matters as much as getting it moved. Pushed back into the road it comes back on the next pass and is a hazard in the meantime. Pushed onto the boulevard it has to clear the sightline for anyone pulling out. Say in your request if there is a fire hydrant, a mailbox or a corner lot involved, because all three change how the snow gets handled.