The snow and ice over the Christmas period has made it a busy time for Nottingham City Council’s gritting crew and street cleaning teams.

The city was hit by a flurry of snow on Boxing Day before temperatures plummeted to below freezing over the next couple of days.

The gritting crews were out on Christmas night and started again in the early evening on Boxing Day. They have been working around the clock since to keep Nottingham’s streets clear and running.

The council’s first priority is always gritting the principal road network before teams move on to secondary areas including bus routes and high-risk pavements like those in the city centre, around shopping centres or complexes for elderly residents.

These areas are determined by the highway team on both a proactive and reactive basis. This means that the council targets certain known hotspots, as well as responding to requests where possible.

Waste collection is traditionally a challenging time over the Christmas period, given the changes to bin days as a result of the Bank Holidays and the extra bags of rubbish that are generated. That has been further complicated this year because of the weather.

However, despite some of the side streets being difficult to collect from, both manoeuvring the bin trucks and underfoot for collection staff, council teams have been collecting as many bins as possible while always operating safely.

Gritters have been helping out by pre-treating the collection routes to give the crews the best possible chance of accessing streets affected by snow and ice.

Meanwhile, more than 50 Street Scene staff are currently operating across Nottingham, mostly on gritting duties at present, but ready for the significant clean-up when the snow and ice melts. The highways department is also on stand-by to deal with any road repairs that occur as a result of the cold snap.