(Bloomberg) -- Scraping against the asphalt, one plow after another made its way down New York's busiest intersections overnight, noisily pushing around the snow that coated the city.
In anticipation of the storm, which the National Weather Service had forecast could dump as much as 18 inches on some parts of the northeastern U.S., the New York City Department of Sanitation split its staff into two shifts on Wednesday, each group of 2,400 working 12 hours at a time to clear the city's roughly 6,500 miles of roads.
Related: Filing a blizzard-related claim? Here's what you should do
|$88 million snow removal budget
Clearing a city the size of New York doesn't come cheap. The sanitation department budgeted $88 million solely for snow removal this year. In addition to its full-time employees, the department also takes on emergency snow laborers, who are paid $15 an hour to shovel out places a plow can't reach, like bus stops, and can earn overtime of $22.50 an hour if they work more than 40 hours a week. Last year, the department hired between 2,000 and 3,000 of these laborers in the aftermath of a major January storm.
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