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The story behind this viral photo of an unplowed Fall River street
“Hopefully we get it plowed at some point today, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Some streets in Fall River remain caked with snow days after Monday’s blizzard, and one striking photo from June Street saw the South Coast neighborhood transformed into something resembling Loon Mountain.
“Our street is still unplowed,” June Street resident Laura Pacheco said Wednesday morning. “Hopefully we get it plowed at some point today, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Another June Street neighbor, Dennis Malenfant, had a sharper take: “The word I’d use is ‘ridiculous.’”
“I realize you can’t plow every street all at once. I get that,” he added. “But, I mean, the effort of this city during the snowstorm is pretty pathetic.”
Blizzard of '26:
While June Street’s staggering slope — as captured by The Boston Globe‘s John Tlumacki and gracing the front page of Wednesday’s paper — paints a particularly dramatic image, it’s far from the only Fall River neighborhood still waiting on a plow. A user-driven plow tracker, which is not officially affiliated with the city, indicated little more than a fifth of Fall River’s streets had been plowed as of 1:30 p.m. Wednesday.
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According to The Herald News in Fall River, the city’s hilly topography and narrow, crowded streets make it difficult to plow. On top of that, the city has just a fraction of the snow removal equipment it did a decade ago, the newspaper reported.
During an appearance on Fall River Community Media Tuesday, Mayor Paul Coogan said city and state officials have tapped additional resources to help with snow removal.
“We want everybody on the streets, clearing streets. There’s a ton of side streets that haven’t been touched yet, so we’re focused on those,” Coogan said. “The sooner we get that done, the sooner the city gets back to normal.”
The mayor also said he’d heard reports of an ambulance struggling to reach someone in need of assistance following the storm, forcing emergency medics to trudge through the snow.
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“It’s totally unfortunate, but this is a natural disaster. That’s what we’re dealing with,” Coogan said, adding, “We got a blizzard, and it whacked out the whole East Coast, and that’s what we’re part of right now.”
Pacheco said she’s trying to be patient as she’s holed up at home, where some of the snow drifts in her backyard almost reach the top of her eight-foot fence.
“It’s just a lot,” she said. “I mean, the city is doing the best they can, and I understand that they have minimal people and minimal equipment. But I just can’t believe there’s just a small percentage of the streets that have been plowed so far.”
Still, Pacheco counts herself lucky — she works from home.
“I don’t know what other people are doing that don’t have that luxury of working from home and things like that, because at some point you do have to get to work,” she said.
Malenfant, a transit bus operator who’s lived on June Street for about 12 years, said the lack of plowing has kept him from reporting for duty.
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“I’ve been three days out already. It looks like it’s going to be four, maybe five,” he said. “It all depends on how soon they get down here to actually plow the street up and get it open so at least we can get out.”
Each missed day of work cuts into his paid vacation time, he said.
Luis Torres, a June Street resident of about a year, called for neighbors to take matters into their own hands to remove the snow, rather than waiting on the city’s response.
“It is frustrating because we all work and none of us want to use our [paid time off] from work” just to be stuck home in the snow, he said via text. “The main streets can be clean but come on, seriously, just don’t focus on that only.”
Pacheco, who’s lived in the neighborhood nearly 11 years, questioned where the city will put the snow, once all the streets are finally plowed.
“It’s just a mess,” she said. “There’s just snow everywhere, obviously, and I’m not sure where they’re going to put it.”
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She believes more communication from city officials would go a long way with frustrated Fall River residents waiting for their streets to be cleared.
“We’ll see how many more days it takes for them to come and clear the snow,” Pacheco said. “But it’s just — the longer they wait, the harder the snow gets, because it gets colder, it freezes.”
To make matters worse, the blizzard dumped feet of snow on top of drifts that were left over from earlier storms. According to Malenfant, Fall River’s snow removal efforts earlier this winter “weren’t really fantastic, to say the least. And I’m being kind here.”
The lackluster cleanup is a relatively newer issue, to his recollection, though he acknowledged the region hasn’t seen many major snowstorms in several years. Malenfant believes city officials should have done more to pre-treat the roads and get ahead of the storm before the first flakes started falling Sunday evening.
“Knowing what was going to happen, they should have been better prepared,” he said. “And we just feel like they just sat back with their hands crossed, just waiting for the snow to fall and saying, ‘Well, here it is.’”
Still waiting for a plow? What’s it been like on your street? ❄️
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