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Winter Maintenance Thin Surfacing Failure Websites of the Month Motto of the Month |
Winter
Maintenance This is a relatively quiet time of the year with regard to highways maintenance, except that it can be a very hectic time of the year for winter maintenance, as it is winter. The recent brief spell of cold weather was a particularly good/bad example of what winter can throw at you in the UK, and in this case I think it was the Midlands that may have suffered the most. My own journey home took three and a quarter hours when it normally takes a half hour, so I could be regarded as one of the lucky ones. I managed this speedy trip home by giving up on the main roads and winding my way through lanes and back streets that had never been salted and driving on the rough snow rather than in the iced up wheel tracks. Winter maintenance is not my area of expertise, but I have my opinions as does everybody else, and since I suffered a little also I feel I am entitled to air them, and I do have a little "insider" knowledge. I have to first state this was the worst case scenario with regard to winter weather I have personally experienced, and having a "window seat" in the office so I did see it happen. In the middle of the afternoon there was a short period of very heavy rain, quite sufficient to wash off the considerable amount of salt that had been spread in anticipation of the forecast snow. The heavy snow duly arrived almost immediately after the rain and laid a blanket of about two inches just before sunset which heralded a dramatic fall in temperatures, the rest we all know. People began leaving their place of work and the evening rush hour (or six) commenced with the snow rapidly becoming packed ice. A few minor bumps and jack-knifed lorries soon blocked the roads and we had gridlock. All the above is well documented by the news services, and I am aware that the various organsiations in charge of winter maintenance were trying their hardest to get gritters where they were needed but it was just impossible to do so because of the stationary traffic. But what I am going to say, that will earn me no praise in certain areas, is that if those "in charge" did not keep demanding "efficiencies" with the centralising of salt stocks and the ever increasing length of salting routes to more "efficiently" cover the road networks without thought of the consequences, then "local" salt stocks would have still been available to more easily reach grid locked urban areas. In my own particular case I am aware that as I passed through my own grid locked small town I was at a junction on a hill that was causing major problems that was within a few hundred yards of where the "Agency" salt pile used to be kept. If that salt pile was still there I am fairly confident that salt would have been spread by whatever means were available on the most difficult sites and the abysmal conditions in one small town in the Midlands would have been a lot less severe than they were. This "efficient" thinking is not very BABSI, Better Access to Better Service Initiatives, which is a current politically driven idea for local authorities to embrace. But winter maintenance is not my area of expertise, as I have said, so I will leave others to find the scape goats for the traffic chaos, as they surely will. Thin
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