CREWS ANSWER THE CALL – Winter storm rolls into Allen County

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February 4, 2014 - 12:00 AM

Busting through a snow drift with a V-shaped plow on the front of a heavy dump truck is fun — for a while.
“It gets old pretty fast,” said Bill King, director of Public Works for Allen County. “Tedium sets.”
County and Iola crews were expected to be in the midst of keeping streets and roads open today, although snow that fell overnight was short of expectations. Advantage was that crews who anticipated being called out in the middle of the night were able to sleep later.
“It would be better if we could wait until the snow stops, but that isn’t an option,” King said, allowing residents who want to get around wouldn’t understand. “When there’s snow, people don’t want to wait.”
Dan Leslie, Streets and Alleys superintendent for Iola, has some of the same feelings.
“We’d prefer to clear streets at night, when there aren’t cars parked on the square and there isn’t any traffic,” he said.
The county has six graders dedicated to rock roads and four trucks for hard-surfaced roads. Two smaller trucks are reserved for subdivisions and to make certain access is maintained to Allen County Regional Hospital in general, and its emergency room in particular.
Iola and the county share responsibility to plow North Kentucky and Oregon Road, direct access routes to the hospital.

HIGH TRAFFIC areas are the priority in and out of town.
State Street, Madison Avenue and the downtown area are first on Leslie’s agenda. In-town thoroughfares — Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Broadway, Garfield, Cottonwood and Miller — also are high on the list, as well as streets near the schools.
King doesn’t play favorites with snow-removal, other than concentrating on keeping heavily traveled hard-surfaced roads open.
“The highest traffic count in the county is old U.S. 169 south of Humboldt,” he said.
“People have to realize that we can’t be everywhere at once,” King added. “We’ll get to all the roads, but sometimes it takes a while.”
Windy conditions expected today could exacerbate drifts, which adds considerably to efforts to keep them open.
“A drift of six to seven feet 100 feet long isn’t too bad, but some of them are a mile long,” King noted. “Those take a long time, and sometimes blow back shut in as little as 15 minutes.”

CREWS IN Iola and the county have sufficient supplies of salt to deal with icing and packed snow.
Both also have apparatus that can add a calcium slurry to pre-wet salt to make it more effective.
Iola’s street treatment mix is one part salt and two parts aggregate, mainly residue that is swept up after summer chip-seal treatment of streets.
“It’s a good way to recycle the material,” Leslie said.
The county mixes salt one-to-three with pea rock, which tends to grind ice and leave it mushy when the salt causes melting.
King’s operations are a little more difficult to coordinate than those in Iola, but he has taken advantage of technology to bridge gaps.
“Used to be we used radios to keep track, but now the guys send me photos from their cell phones, which helps immensely in keeping everything going in the right direction,” King said.

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