Snow, ice, sleet, hail — armed with salt and ready!
The terrain in Northwest Arkansas can make icy roads more hazardous. The crews of the Arkansas Highway Department work around the clock to clear those roads and make it safer for their neighbors. And now, with new trucks and a larger supply of salt, they’re ready for winter weather.
The newest trucks have a 12foot wide snow plow on the front, a 10-foot wide snow plow beneath the truck (a belly plow) and a salt spreader.
This past weekend they prepared to work 12-hour shifts and longer to keep the highways in their area clear to facilitate travel.
“If it’s in our forecast, somebody will be here,” John Johnson, maintenance supervisor at Garfield, said. “We had four people here at 4 a.m. the other day. Nothing happened.”
Johnson, crew leader Paul Thornhill and the 18 road workers are committed to keep the roadways clear as much as possible.
A new building — 54 feet wide, 80 feet long and with the peak of the dome standing at 32 feet — was constructed this year; it has 2,950 tons of salt waiting to be used. Johnson, who has worked out of the Garfield shop for 23 years, remembers when there were just bags of salt stored in sheds.
“We just finished (the new building) this year. We did a lot of the work ourselves. A contractor built the concrete walls,” Johnson said, recalling that when he and Thornhill started, they would work all night unloading a couple of semi-truck loads of salt in bags. He said they have more salt on hand than was previously used in a year.
There is also a storage building on Interstate 49 near the Pinnacle exit that has 650 tons of salt stored and provides a way-station for the crew working along the interstate.
“When the storm begins, we focus on our A routes,” Johnson said. “The trucks that go to the in- terstate and 71 will load materials from the interstate. They don’t come back here.”
“We take the fuel to them,” Thornhill said. “We get our people what they need — oil, windshield blades.”
Johnson said new measures have been instituted that improve efficiency. The two drivers working the interstate will work their route consistently until it’s clear. The next crew will use a truck from the Garfield station to drive to the interstate, meet and relieve the drivers, and perform routine maintenance on the trucks, including filling with fuel, checking the oil and windshield wipers all from the station beside the inter- state. The drivers leaving work will use the crew truck to return to the Garfield station. Thereby, the snow plows are kept in service.
Each driver is assigned a section of road and drives a continuous loop making numerous trips, around and around, until the roadway is clear.
“It depends on how frozen it is to the surface. There are times when you may have two inches of ice and may only shave off onequarter of an inch. That’s eight trips around to clear providing nothing else falls,” Johnson said.
When the snow or ice is coming down very heavy and traffic is slow, they will sometimes run two trucks abreast, clearing two lanes at one time.
“We have an extra truck this year,” Johnson said. “Providing that we’re able to keep the interstate clear, keep it moving; providing that we don’t have breakdowns, we have an extra truck that we’ll be able to get on our B routes quicker.”
Weather and road conditions determine the materials used as well as how easily roads are cleared. This past weekend’s storm, which did not materialize, was coming on the heels of warm temperatures that kept the roadways relatively warm, decreasing the potential for frozen precipitation to stay on the roads and making it easier to clear the roads. When snow or ice falls on roadways that are extremely cold, they’re more difficult to clear, Johnson explained.
Beet juice added to salt will allow the salt to melt the ice or snow at lower temperature, he said. Salt alone will melt at temperatures as low as 25 degrees, but beet juice is needed for temperatures below that.
Previously, the crews used a mixture of sand and salt. Now, they’re using straight salt.
“The thing the sand did was provide color and people realized it,” he said. “All of our spreaders are calibrated to put out a certain amount of salt. We try to get 200 pounds per lane mile.”
Johnson watches the weather forecast often and monitors the National Weather Service on the Internet. He said rock salt is not spread in advance of a storm because traffic will “kick it off.” If
“Every single storm is different. That’s why it’s so tricky.” John Johnson Ark. Hwy. Dept. supervisor
there is no rain preceding the winter storm, roadways can be pretreated with salt brine as much as 12 hours prior to a storm.
“It will stay on the road,” Johnson said. “We can do that well in advance of the storm.
“We monitor the temperatures of the roads and bridge decks. Once they start freezing, then we will use rock salt,” he said, showing a temperature gauge used to check pavement temperature.
“Every single storm is different. That’s why it’s so tricky,” Johnson said.
“What makes it easy or not is road temperature. If the road temperature is 20 degrees, everything is going to stick. Nothing is going to slush,” Johnson said, recalling being out in the truck when the snow was falling so heavy that he couldn’t see where he was.
“In the past, we ran to every call,” Johnson said. “That felt good from our position because we knew we were getting there, but it left the main routes to deteriorate … all the work they’d done on the interstate was basically lost.”
He said 80,000 cars travel I-49 a day.
“The bad thing is, you can’t go everywhere. You just can’t.”
The new policy is to keep the A routes clear and then go to the B routes, unless there is an emergency to which they’re called and, then, Johnson sends an ex- tra truck and does not take a truck off the A route.
Each truck is equipped with a GPS and Johnson can check the location of the trucks at all times. He said that people have complained in the past that a truck went down the highway and wasn’t using the plow or spreader. But often, Johnson said, that is a city or county truck, not one of the state trucks. Each agency has its territorial jurisdiction.
Two state highways — Ark. Hwy. 94 and Hwy. 72 — run through Pea Ridge. Johnson said city crews have always addressed the worst spots — Kitchen hill on Ark. Hwy. 94 east of the city and the Bill hill north of Sugar Creek on Ark. Hwy. 94. “Those guys have always worked on those… they don’t have to do that. We definitely appreciate that,” Johnson said.
There is a salt-brine maker in the yard and a tanker truck that will hold 4,500 gallons of salt brine. It’s used to pretreat roads when conditions warrant, but has been used at the end of a storm to help get the last of the ice to melt off, he said.
The seven trucks with plows and spreaders, one tanker truck, one road grader and contract road graders will be out in force when the next winter storm hits. And, after the storm is over, their work continues.
“When it’s over, we have to clear the trucks, fix equipment … it’s very hard on equipment,” Johnson said, explaining that blades are repaired or replaced as needed, all equipment is washed to remove the salt which will “eat it up.” It takes days to clean up after an event.
“For more people, the storm begins when it starts getting slick and it’s over when it’s not slick anymore. Not so for us,” he said. “We have loved ones, family, friends, who need to get to work and kids to get to school. We want the roads cleared just as bad as everybody else,” he said.
For more than two decades, Johnson and Thornhill have worked together on the state highways in Northeast Benton County.
“It’s kind of an adrenaline rush,” Thornhill said of the work. “It gets in your blood.”
They said usually shifts change at 7 a.m. “if a tree hasn’t fall on the road,” they grimaced, recalling numerous times shifts have been prolonged by conditions. Both said several people worked extremely long shifts (as long as 19-20 hours) during the December flood.
Have they ever been scared?
“There are too many to tell,” Thornhill smiled.
Thornhill and Johnson both recalled times that were dangerous and scary. One in particular involved a truck and trailer sliding on the roadway coming towards Johnson who was in a state truck. “The trailer was sliding across in my lane. I was going up a hill. There was a guard rail and I couldn’t get off the road. Thankfully, as he came around the corner, the trailer straightened up.”