DOT shorthanded as winter takes hold
Official: Big storm could pose ‘huge problem’ for agency
A “perfect storm” of problems made the Wednesday morning commute treacherous across Connecticut, but officials said it wasn’t because of a tenuous staffing issue at the state Department of Transportation driven by job openings and a surge in COVID-19 infections.
While the freezing rain Wednesday was a quick storm driven by a cold snap that caused precipitation to quickly freeze on the roads, a blizzard or other prolonged winter weather event could stress the DOT’s diminished staff, officials said.
“The big concern is if we have multi-day events,” said Garrett Eucalitto, a deputy commissioner at DOT.
According to Eucalitto, there are 265 absences from the highway operations division, responsible for snow cleanup, along with 193 unfilled positions.
The absences, Eucalitto said, are DOT employees who have tested positive and are quarantining, or are waiting for a test in order to work.
In addition to coping with the COVID absences, Eucalitto said the agency is trying to fill the nearly 200 job openings.
“We’ve been trying to do a big push to recruit more people into the agency, as with the entire nation getting people with CDL licenses is proving difficult,” he said.
The ideal staffing for that bureau of DOT is roughly 1,600 workers, so the openings and absences have created nearly a 30 percent decrease in staff.
“If we are down by 400 to 500 people, that’s going to be a huge problem,” Eucalitto said if the agency encounters a prolonged weather event. “We are going to have to ask people to stay home during those events. We are going to have to talk about restricting travel.”
While the snow events so far this winter have been relatively small, January, February and March bring the potential for these “long-duration” storms.
Eucalitto said at times they require crews to work for 24 to 36 hours to clear roadways.
“They need rest breaks,” he said.
On Wednesday, Connecticut was hit by freezing rain that led to hundreds of crashes across the state during the morning commute. While Eucalitto acknowledged staff problems at DOT, he said it was a unique and challenging combination of weather conditions that made the roads so slick.
“It was kind of this Goldilocks zone of ineffective options to pre-treat our roadways normally,” Eucalitto said. “What you’d see is we’d lay out some brine solution … pre-treat with some liquid to ensure that ice does not form when a precipitation event starts. The other option for pre-treatment is to spread salt, rock salt essentially . ... Both of those would not work in this situation.”
For the pre-treatment solution, the issue came down to the recent cold snap earlier this week that drove road temperatures down to about 22 degrees, which would have frozen the brine and prevented adequate spread, Eucalitto said.
But it’s also been dry, so if the crews spread road salt, it would have been blown to the edges of the highways and streets by the air pressure created by passing cars, making it useless in thawing frozen precipitation, according to Eucalitto.
So DOT had all of its crews staged across the state with salt, waiting for the precipitation to start. But the situation was still not ideal, Eucalitto said. “The air temperature was warm enough that everything coming down was rain, and the road temperatures, it froze before our crews could get over the highways,” he said.
Before conditions cleared as temperatures increased, state police reported hundreds of calls for service and dozens of motor vehicle accidents.
Unlike DOT, the COVID-19 absences for state police appear to be less severe.
“The number of troopers out of work fluctuates daily. At this point, only a small percentage of troopers are out of work due to COVID. The daily operations of the Connecticut State Police and the public safety of the State of Connecticut have not been affected,” said Brian Foley, aide to Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection Commissioner James Rovella.
The next threat for winter weather comes overnight Thursday into Friday morning, when the National Weather Service predicts a moderate to high chance of 2 inches of snow or more across much of Connecticut. Some areas in the region could see up to 6 inches of snow, although those total accumulations are not expected in Connecticut. The weather service estimates an average of about 3 inches falling across the state.
“We think we can manage it,” Eucalitto said. “We just want people to be patient it might not be as rapid response clearance as people are used to being down by almost a quarter, 30 percent of our plow crews. A snow event is easier for us to respond to than an ice event.”