How come we never saw the District’s big snow melter out during this month’s historic winter storms? WRC/NBC4’s Tom Sherwood set about finding out, and discovered that it’s just sitting there on the city’s public works lot, inoperable.

City officials declined a request for an on-camera interview, saying in a statement the snow melter needed parts, was difficult to operate and wasn’t worth using again. So it sits on the city’s public works lot.

And just to make it more mysterious, the city government refused the News4 request to photograph it, though a source provided a couple of pictures of the machine.

As Sherwood notes, the snow melter, which was a $120,000 emergency purchase back in 2003, is designed to allow 10 dump truck loads of snow at a time to be reduced to water. So why wasn’t it ever repaired? Looks like this subject will come up again at Jim Graham’s Public Works Committee hearing on Friday.