Boston just can't get rid of its 'vile' piles of snow

Temperatures are rising in Boston, but it's not enough to melt the piles of snow that still dot the landscape.

The piles are filled with garbage and debris picked up by snow plows during the city's record-setting storms this winter and spring, and even with the sun beating down on them now, the piles aren't close to fully melting away. A pile in the Seaport District that was once 75 feet tall is now a mere three stories, with a hodgepodge of junk encapsulated inside the ice. "It's vile," Michael Dennehy, commissioner of the city's Department of Public Works, told The Boston Globe. "We're finding crazy stuff; bicycles, orange cones that people used as space savers. The funniest thing they found was half of a $5 bill. They're looking for the other half still."

Dennehy said crews capture the trash as it slowly breaks free from the mound, and so far they have removed 85 tons of debris. To lighten the mood, workers started a pool to guess when the pile might finally be gone for good, a game Dennehy knows he didn't win. "I said by May 30, but that's this weekend," he said. "It's still weeks away from melting."

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