Just in case: Sochi storing snow for 2014 Olympics

Sochi organizers are gathering up 16 million cubic feet of snow and trying to keep it from melting away this summer as a contingency ahead of the Winter Games, which take place in February. 

sochiSOCHI, Russia In April, at the end of another seemingly endless winter, most Russians are eager to get rid of the piles of snow that have clogged their streets and yards for months.

Yet down south in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, fleets of heavy machinery and a corps of laborers are hard at work trying to store acres of the freezing white stuff for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Two test events for the Sochi Games — snowboarding parallel slalom and slopestyle skiing — had to be canceled in February because of lack of snow or rainy weather in the region set along Russia’s southern border. That raised alarms for Russian organizers, who shuddered to think of the blowback if the same problem turned up when the world is watching the Sochi Olympics, which run from Feb. 7 to 23 next year.

So organizers are gathering up 16 million cubic feet of snow and trying to keep it from melting away this summer. That’s roughly the same volume as the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in four minutes — by anymeasure, a big amount.

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