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New York|When the Snow Won’t Melt, New York Brings Out the Hot Tubs
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/nyregion/new-york-hot-tubs-snow-storm.html
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With no warm weather expected any time soon, the city’s snow piles require mechanical intervention.
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Jan. 28, 2026
Three days after the snow stopped falling, patches of New York City remain buried. Snow blocking the bus stops. Snow encasing cars. Snow turning crosswalks into single-track paths. Snow everywhere, tons upon tons, and little chance that any of it will melt on its own anytime soon.
How might a big, powerful city like New York regain its mastery over such a frozen nuisance?
By dumping mountains of it into eight hot tubs placed strategically around the city. Obviously.
On Wednesday morning, the city’s Sanitation Department deployed one such tub — imagine the dumping end of a dump truck painted fluorescent orange — near the southern tip of Manhattan. Next to the machine sat a long pile of gray snow gathered from the roughly 12 inches that fell on the city over the weekend. Enough, in the estimation of Javier Lojan, acting sanitation commissioner, to cover a football field.
The hot tub — officially, the Trecan Combustion 60-PD Snowmelter — arrived from a city garage on Tuesday morning. It took 30 minutes to get the machine warmed up, said Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the Sanitation Department. It remained in operation nearly all day, with short pauses only every eight hours to prevent overheating, Mr. Goodman said.
On Wednesday morning, a bright orange front-end loader accelerated toward the snow pile, its bucket scraping the ground and gathering, according to Mr. Lojan, half a ton of snow. After an awkward three-point turn, the loader advanced gingerly toward the tub with its bucket raised. The loader’s operator shook the bucket, causing the entire vehicle to bounce on its bulbous tires. The snow and ice dropped into the snow melter and a burst of steam shot from the hopper. Soon, a stream of brown water ran from a downspout in the machine’s belly directly into an open sewer manhole.
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