In a statement, police said this week that plowing snow from private driveways and walkways onto roadways is illegal and dangerous.

Private snowplow drivers and homeowners are legally liable when snow is plowed onto roadways. Such incidents may result in $50 fines, per incident, based on state law, police said.

Police urge that the snow plowed at a property be kept on that property.

Snow plowed onto roadways causes narrowed roadways, resulting in travel problems for emergency services personnel seeking access to properties, police said.

In addition, while the creation of snow berms — the thick banks of snow and often some of the sand left in the wake of a passing snow plow — are inevitable, they are meant to run parallel to roads, however.

When they run across the travel portion of a road, they are no longer inevitable: they are dangerous. Hitting a snow berm can result in damage to a vehicle or worse, it could throw a driver into a slide or spin.

Berms are also created when a plow is used to push or pull snow from a driveway and across a roadway to clear a driveway. The practice may be easier due to the layout of some driveways, but it is a dangerous and illegal practice.

If a roadway is cleared of snow, and then a second plow does not fully clear away snow that has been dragged across a roadway, a berm is left behind. If left uncleared, these bumps can freeze overnight and create an unexpected bump in a roadway. Left for a few days, berms can soften or melt during the day, and then refreeze, covering a larger space, during the night.

Public Works Director Fred Hurley spoke with The Newtown Bee about the problem in 2011, saying it isn’t always done maliciously, but plowing across a roadway is still a bad practice.

“You get new crops of snowplow drivers very few years, and I think they really just don’t know any better,” he said.

Homeowner Responsibilities

Drivers and homeowners also have their own responsibilities to keep roadways safe.

Newtown has an overnight parking restriction that goes into effect for the winter months.

Ordinance 28, Section 295-5 states that vehicles of any kind are not to be parking “on any Town highway in the Town of Newtown from sunset to sunrise from November 15 to March 15.” Vehicles parked on the side of the road, if deemed to be a nuisance to plow drivers, can be towed from that location “at the expense of the owner or the person in possession thereof” (Section 295-6).

Vehicle owners will have to pay to have their vehicles returned (Section 295-7), and will also face a $90 fine (Section 295-8), a fee that was increased in 2003 more than threefold from its original level of $25.