One year ago, city crews were hard at work facing the daunting task of removing the massive amount of snow on the streets of Estevan.

Today, the city has sent crews to clean up the streets except now, it is the street sweepers, not the graders and snow plows. 

"The predicted high for today is plus eight and we have no snow on the streets," explained City Roads and Drainage Manager, Norm Mack. "We have a lot of sand on our yellows lines and we want to expose the yellow lines for safety purposes. The dirt that is one these lines is doing no good even if it is does snow. Nice weather, plus eight, we might as well do what we have to do and clean up the lines."

"If it's going to act like spring, we're going to treat it like spring. We're going to do what we got to do to clean up the city."

He adds that being able to use the sweepers this time of year is somewhat rare. 

"Last year we were blowing snow nonstop but the year before, there was only one month in that particular year that the street sweepers were not running. That was a very mild winter, and we had them out in December and again in February. It is very uncommon but with weather conditions of late, you never know what you're going to run into."

Mack went on to say that the warm weather has helped crews completed some projects they wouldn't have normally been able to finish.

"It's allowed our city crews to focus on a lot of other jobs that were not complete and little jobs and maintenance that we're doing right now. We're all keeping busy."

"It's nice to see that we're not fighting snow drifts and snow banks just prior to Christmas and we'll enjoys as we can because we don't know what is around the corner. We're ready for any type of weather Mother Nature throws at us."

December 12, 2016: .