Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what is a snow dragon and how does it eat and digest so much snow? The northern cities of the United States have experienced a lot of snow this winter, a lot of snow, many feet of snow. If you've been to Chicago or New York City, you've seen the snow. They have a problem because you can only plow so much snow before it creates giant snow walls and giant
snow canyons on the streets of a big city. So, for example, if you're in New York City and you're a city manager and you need to get rid of snow on the street, you can plow it to the side only so much because there are part cars on the side. And then there's the sidewalk. And if you've been to New York City in the evening, you know that the sidewalk is important not only for pedestrians, but because that's where people put their trash for trash pickup.
If you pile the sidewalks up with ten ft of snow from the streets, then you cut off all pedestrian access and you make it impossible to pick up garbage, and you have a mess. So you have to do something else with the snow. And in the past there have only been two options. You can either pick it up with front end loaders and dump it into parking lots or vacant lots or city parks or someplace like that. You pile it up in huge mountains, or you can take a front end loader and dump the snow into
dump trucks and truck it out of the city. Within the last few years, a new tool has become available to big cities that are experiencing way too much snow. It's called the snow Dragon, and it gives city managers another option. A snow dragon and machines like it from other manufacturers are giant and snow melting machines that will melt snow on the spot. If you've ever seen a snow dragon, you know that it's a fairly simple device.
It's form is a big trailer that you would pull behind a truck, and part of the trailer is a large diesel engine and a large diesel burner, and the other part of the trailer is a huge tank into which front end loaders can dump snow. So in operation you have front end loaders pulling up and dumping snow into the tank. And in that tank there's a large quantity of water, you know, maybe ten thousand gallons of
water or something like that. That water is being pumped by a diesel powered pump through a heating unit, a diesel powered heating unit to get warmed up, so it's pumped out of the tank through the heater back into the tank through spray nozzles, and this gives a snow dragon a way to melt snow very very quickly, because hot running water is the enemy of snow, so as snow goes in, it gets turned into water, and as more snow gets in, the water overflows out of pipe
and it's then just run into the normal sewer system or the street drainage system of the city. Snow dragons and the machines like it are not cheap. They cost about a quarter of a million dollars each, and they're fairly expensive to operate. They cost about three hundred dollars an hour to operate because they're burning forty or fifty gallons of diesel fuel per hour to generate the heat
that's needed to melt the snow. But the advantages They can process something like thirty tons of snow per hour, which is a huge quantity of snow, and you have to compare that cost to the cost of trucking. So if you were loading that snow into dump trucks and hauling it for miles outside the city, that would have a cost for the dump trucks and for the fuel to fuel those dump trucks. So by comparison, a snow dragon actually starts to look fairly reasonably priced, probably even
lower costs than a large scale dump truck operation. The next time you're in a big city and there's a bunch of snow, keep an eye out for front end loaders that are moving the snow around. Generally speaking, they'll either be moving it into a parking lot or into a dump truck, or they'll be loading it into one of these new snow dragon machines. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore them as promising
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