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Not like the last one: Warm weather set to begin melting snow in NYC later this week
By
Liam Quigley
Published Feb 23, 2026
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Jeremy Weine/Getty Images
By
Liam Quigley
Published Feb 23, 2026
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This week’s blizzard might have buried the city in twice as much snow as the one that hit town in January, but the powder is not expected to remain on the streets and sidewalks even close to as long.
That’s because, unlike last month’s storm that was followed by weeks of frigid temperatures, forecasters are anticipating warmer weather in the coming week, with temperatures expected to reach the 40s as soon as Wednesday. It’s warm enough to begin melting the 20-plus inches that hit the city Sunday into Monday.
The freeze that followed last month’s storm turned the city into a winter wasteland filled with ridges and mounds of snow covered in dog excrement, urine, trash and grime. The frigid temperatures also proved deadly, with the conditions a factor in the deaths of nearly two dozen people, and those indoors filed a record number of complaints about not having heat or hot water.
It took three weeks before the bulk of the snow melted from streets and sidewalks, forcing the sanitation department to deploy a massive operation where crews loaded snow into dump trucks and carried it to one of eight sites where it could be liquified and dumped into the city’s sewer system.
Sanitation officials said it was too early to say if they’d need to reactivate that snow-melting system.
Bryan Ramsey, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said the weather should melt much of the snow — but noted only a fraction of it will turn to liquid in the short term.
“ We're looking at some significant snow on the ground,” he said. It's gonna take a long time for that to melt, but on the bright side, those temperatures are gonna be a little warmer.”
This time around, the sanitation department has relied more heavily on its army of emergency snow shovelers, deploying 873 temporary workers on Monday morning who could make up to $28.71 an hour.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said snow laborers cleared 1,600 crosswalks, 419 fire hydrants and around 900 bus stops in the first hours of the storm.
City officials said the snow-clearing efforts from Sunday into Monday were the most significant since 2016, when storms dumped a record 36 inches of snow on Central Park.
“ We've been through the rodeo before with this storm and we haven't had a storm of this magnitude today since 2016,” said Jason Leavy, one of thousands of sanitation workers assigned to clearing the snow from the streets.
Brittany Kriegstein contributed reporting to this story.
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new york city
sanitation
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Liam Quigley
Liam Quigley is a reporter covering parks & sanitation for Gothamist and WNYC. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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