PORTLAND – Every time the snow falls, the city’s fleet of plow trucks brushes the white stuff to the sides of the streets. Then, at night, heavy equipment swoops in. By morning, the snow is usually gone.

This year, though, there’s a wrinkle in the fine-tuned system: the city is running out of places to put so much snow.

The nor’easter that brought blizzard conditions to southern and central Maine dropped 17 inches of snow in Portland. That translates to about 35 or 40 tons of snow that must be removed from 323 miles of city streets.

Much of that snow is trucked away to a spot most folks don’t even know about: the city’s “snow dump” near the airport.

“Our snow dump is up to capacity right now. Either we need a good old snow melt, or no more snow, or preferably both,” said Peter DeWitt, spokesman for the Portland Public Works Department.

“Snow dump” is a fancy name for a 5-acre field that’s the final resting place for truckload after truckload of snow from city streets.

This season, there was no thaw in January or February, and the temperature remained cold enough to keep a thick carpet of snow on people’s lawns. Likewise, the snow at the dump never melted, and continued to pile up higher and higher.

The dump now consists of huge mounds of snow 50 feet high, and there is no more space for the trucks to put snow.

“It looks like Mount Everest in a sense, because as far as the eye can see, there are huge piles of snow banked on top of each other. You could go there in April and get some pretty decent sledding,” DeWitt said.

Indeed, it would be a heavenly place for sledding, but local kids don’t know about it. The Public Works Department doesn’t want them to know.

In the good old days, municipalities didn’t worry about piles of snow. Many simply dumped it in the ocean. Portland used to put its snow next to the back cove, where the water lapped at the piles.

In 1988, the 50-foot-high pile was dubbed “Flaherty’s Mountain” in honor of then-Public Works Director George Flaherty.

But those days are over.

State environmental regulators clamped down on the practice 10 years ago because of concerns about tons of salt, oil and other pollutants – not to mention mufflers or hubcaps – being dumped directly in the water.

That means municipalities must dump their snow on land. And it poses the biggest problem for cities like Portland, where many of the narrow streets date back to the cart-and-buggy days.