Snowmen

We know how much you love the snow in Moscow, and we thought that you’d like to know some very interesting things about Russia’s favourite natural resource:

* On average, 160 cm of snow falls in Moscow during one winter season.
* A record 177 cm of snow has fallen in Moscow since the beginning of this winter season, which has been one of the snowiest in the past few years.
* An average of 45 million cubic metres of snow has to be removed from about 90 sq. km of the city’s territories during winter.
* For more than five years now, private businesses have been competing in a tender for maintaining the city’s territories. In a season it is possible to earn about 60 million roubles from the cleaning of just one small area.
* It costs more than 70 million roubles to remove 1cm of snow from the city as a whole in a season. Since it is impossible to guess the exact amount of snowfall for the winter, Moscow city’s authorities spend a lot of time listening to the weather forecast.
* For this season, 9.2 billion roubles were allocated from the city’s budget to remove snow from the streets of Moscow. This money had to be used for buying chemical reagents and new equipment, repairing existing machines, paying salaries for road sweepers, and, of course, hiring private companies.
* Private companies charge between 3000 to 3500 roubles for removing 20 cubic metres of snow (the quantity of snow that a standard KamAz truck can transport).
* On the first day of spring about 15 cm of snow fell in the city.
* Not less than 20 cm of snow is forecast to fall in Moscow in March.