With the arrival of above-freezing temperatures, Philadelphia is declaring an end to an emergency response that lasted 26 days, closing the chapter on an all-hands-on-deck mobilization of various city departments that navigated the biggest snowfall in a decade and the persistent cold snap that followed.
The city’s “enhanced code blue” response began the Friday before a winter storm that blanketed Philadelphia with 9.3 inches of snow and sleet on Jan. 25. The designation allowed the city to deploy support services across departments for some of the city’s most vulnerable, living on the streets.
A preliminary estimate by the city puts the cost of the storm response at about $59 million, which officials said reflects the intensity of the storm and conditions that followed.
“A tremendous City workforce, outreach teams, first responders, nonprofit partners, and community stakeholders came together without hesitation,” Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said in a statement Tuesday. “Because of their coordination, compassion, and commitment, lives were protected during some of the harshest conditions we have faced this winter.”
Amid a bitter cold that hampered snow-removal efforts, the city embarked on a cleanup operation that lasted more than two weeks and combined heavy machinery and old-fashioned manual digging.
Here are some key numbers highlighting how various city departments mobilized and the costs they accrued.
$46,021,516 in snow removal
The city crafted its $4.1 million snow operations budget for fiscal year 2026 using a rolling-year average of prior costs.
But the storm brought about a slew of unanticipated expenses and challenges, including snow removal, ice control, and other emergency operations.
The city looked to contractors to bolster its workforce as it launched a massive effort to treat and plow streets.
Contractor plowing and salting operations during the storm cost $13.9 million, while the post-storm contractor cleaning and lifting operations cost $31.8 million. The remainder of the expenses came from snow-related operations across departments, such as the activation of warming centers.
Part of what made the storm so costly was the uncooperative temperatures.
Amid complaints from residents over what was perceived as a slow cleanup, the city noted that the below-freezing temperatures created increasingly tightly packed ice that had nowhere to go.
The city even brought in a snow melter from Chicago, which eliminated 4.7 million pounds of snow in the first two days after the snowfall. The costs of melting, which is considered a specialized service, ran more than $139,000.
After the initial snow removal, the city moved to what it called its lifting operations.
Snowplows, compactors, front-end loaders, and backhoes took part in an intricate operation where snow was placed in dumpsters before being shipped off to more than 30 dumping sites.
The Philadelphia Streets Department mobilized up to 300 pieces of equipment on any given day in an effort to leave no street untreated.
The city went through 15,000 tons of salt through the three-week cleanup amid other challenges, such as an icy Delaware River that temporarily blocked additional salt orders, and the rising cost of salt post-storm.
The cost of salt was more than $1.2 million.
18,340 ramps cleared
The massive cleanup had the city looking at creative ways to boost the number of workers clearing streets.
The streets department tapped participants in its Future Track Program for snow-removal efforts early on. These are trainees, typically at-risk young adults, who are not enrolled in higher education and are unemployed. They get job experience, as well as other services, and they help in beautification projects.
The trainees cleared hundreds of ADA ramps across Philadelphia.
But more than a week after the storm, the city was still being flooded with complaints about inaccessible crosswalks and SEPTA stops piled with ice.
That’s when officials tapped into a city program that pays people the same day for their work, deploying 300 people to help chip and sweep away the hardened ice with shovels and brooms.
The city assembled a more than 1,000-person workforce for cleanup efforts this way, deploying a mix of city employees, contractors, and participants from the same-day pay program.
In all, the city said, the crews worked nearly 2,300 intersections, clearing 18,340 ADA ramps and about 2,800 SEPTA stops.
The use of contractors, however, was met with pushback from American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 33, the city’s largest municipal workers union, which said the decision was made without consulting the union.
“Our members are the trained, dedicated workforce responsible for this work, and it is disheartening to see the administration move forward without even a discussion on how best to manage these challenges,” DC 33 president Greg Boulware said in a statement in early February.
(function() { var l = function() { new pym.Parent( ‘phillysnowcosts__graphic’, ‘https://media.inquirer.com/storage/inquirer/ai2html/phillysnowcosts/index.html’); }; if(typeof(pym) === ‘undefined’) { var h = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0], s = document.createElement(‘script’); s.type = ‘text/javascript’; s.src = ‘https://pym.nprapps.org/pym.v1.min.js’; s.onload = l; h.appendChild(s); } else { l(); } })();
22 warming centers
The cold snap presented another life-or-death challenge for the city: how to get people living on the streets indoors.
Between Jan. 20 and Feb. 14, homeless outreach teams worked nonstop distributing more than 2,800 warming kits, 4,000 fleece blankets, 700 cases of water, and 35,000 food items while trying to get people to take a shelter bed or go to one of the city’s 22 so-called warming centers.
The code blue designation allowed the city to activate some libraries and recreation centers as hubs for people looking to escape the cold.
The warming center operation was seen as lifesaving, largely supported by library staff. Between Jan. 19 and Feb. 11, New York City recorded at least 18 cold-related deaths; Philadelphia had three over a similar time frame.
Still, after 20 days of 12-hour operations, staff at the daytime centers described a lack of support from the city when it came to dealing with people who had medically complex issues requiring behavioral health support and wound care. (One library staffer said more city-assigned support staff showed up at the daytime centers after The Inquirer published a report about workers’ concerns.)
Philadelphia officials said more than 100 people from more than 20 city and partner organizations helped support the warming centers.
Nighttime warming centers had about 4,400 overnight guests, according to the city.
$50 million from general fund
Because snow operations exceeded the initial amount allotted in the budget, the city plans to transfer $50 million from its general fund to its transportation fund.
Even so, the city said its general fund remains higher than projected in its five-year plan because of a larger-than-anticipated general fund balance in the previous fiscal year.
