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AHTD Uses Lessons Learned Last Winter

6 min read

Winter weather can make a mess of travel in Arkansas, as anyone stuck on an interstate for hours upon hours in eastern Arkansas in March 2014 could attest.

It might not look it, but Arkansas has some of the most highway miles in the country with more than 16,000, ranking it 12th in the United States. Throw in more than 7,000 bridges, and the Arkansas Highway & Transportation Department understandably can be overwhelmed when an ice storm sweeps though the state.

Scott Bennett, the director of the AHTD since 2011, said the state got hit hard this year by winter weather, but his crews handled it effectively after learning some hard lessons in 2014. The shutdown of eastern Arkansas in March 2014 was an eye-opener, and a catalyst for some changes.

“This year was a pretty severe winter, but I think we handled it a lot better than in years past,” Bennett said. “There were a lot of lessons learned from last year. The event last year really made us look at how we look at our winter weather operations. There was one really big storm where we had 6 inches of ice in places in east and northeast Arkansas, and we had temperatures below freezing for several days in a row. That’s not really normal for Arkansas.”

This year’s weather may not have seemed as severe as the previous year — when many public schools had to extend the school year or get exemptions because of snow days — but Bennett said this year was hectic because of the timing of the storms.

“Early on, we didn’t have a lot of winter weather, but, when it came, it came in several waves,” Bennett said. “We had about enough time to clean up from one storm and get everything repurposed, and then the next storm came. There wasn’t a lot of time in between.”

Still, Bennett was proud of his department’s improvement this year. Several factors were responsible for that improvement, including an upgrade in equipment, more maintenance personnel and a more aggressive pretreatment strategy.

The department ordered several “belly plows” for this year’s weather at a cool $180,000 apiece. The belly plow is a full-sized dump truck with a plow blade on the front and another one under the body of the truck.

The theory is the heavy weight of the truck will help the middle blade be more effective in scraping ice, sleet and snow from the roads. Bennett said road crews that used the belly plows praised their effectiveness.

The department formed a “strike force” of five or so belly plows that could respond to the threat of weather from the Little Rock headquarters. That plan came in handy when the state got hit by several storms in different areas throughout the year.

“We had some that hit northeast Arkansas first, and we had some that hit northwest Arkansas first,” Bennett said. “A lot of times there’s a delay, even as much as a day, where we can send the strike force to one area of the state to start helping and then move to another part of the state.”

Bennett said the AHTD is also working to improve its training of plow drivers statewide. When weather was bad in north Arkansas, Bennett pulled crews from south Arkansas to help out, but driving on southern Arkansas highways is much different than driving the twisting hills in north Arkansas.

“It’s an extremely dangerous job,” Bennett said. “The first thing we do when an event comes in is send a notice to everybody: ‘Don’t get out unless you absolutely have to.’ Then we’re the ones who are out there all the time.

“Even though the governor issues a whatever you call it and says government is closed, we aren’t closed.”

Pretreatment Proves Key

One of the biggest keys in battling winter weather is treating the pavement before the storm hits to prevent as much moisture as possible from sticking. That’s not as easy as it sounds — and it doesn’t sound particularly easy to pretreat thousands of miles of roads that are being used by the public — because temperature plays a big role in the effectiveness of the pretreatment.

Putting salt on a road or bridge prevents freezing rain and ice from sticking, unless the temperature drops below 20 degrees, and then salt is useless. Salt mixed with beet juice doesn’t freeze below 20 degrees, so Bennett said crews had to know exactly what the temperature was going to be before and during the storm to know what mixture to pretreat with.

A sudden unexpected drop in temperature could make a dump truck full of salt a waste of a truck and of salt. Bennett said the AHTD contracted with a weather service called Iteris that provided accurate forecasts of expected precipitation amounts and ground temperatures.

“You can’t keep it from accumulating,” Bennett said. “A lot of people think you need to put something out there so as soon as it hits it’s going to melt and it’s going to be gone. You can’t do that. You want to keep it from really grabbing hold of the pavement. That way the plows can really bust it up and move it off the road. We did a lot better job with that this year.”

Bennett said crews also focused more on clearing the most-used highways first before then moving to secondary roads. He said last year’s crews tried to hit everything at once and that proved less effective.

“We really needed to concentrate on those higher-traveled routes first,” Bennett said. “The way we used to handle things in the past was like my mom used to say, ‘You hit everything with a lick and a promise.’ You give it a lick now and you promise to do more later. We were really spread too thin everywhere, and we weren’t able to handle anything adequately.”

The crews were spread thin, though. Pretreating and plowing miles upon miles of highways is a grueling, time-consuming task that wore out drivers, loaders and equipment.

Bennett said the AHTD had more than 2,000 people working during winter storms in 12-hour shifts, and maintenance crews were ready around the clock to keep the belly plows and salt spreaders in working condition. The department also works with county road departments and highway construction crews, which will keep construction areas cleared and then be reimbursed by the state.

An Extra $18 Million

All the equipment, personnel and maintenance improvements cost money. Bennett said the AHTD earmarked an extra $18 million a year to hire more maintenance personnel and upgrade its equipment.

That money has to come from somewhere because the federal government, as yet, has not solved the problem of the Highway Trust Fund, which faces a $100 billion shortfall in the next decade. Bennett said the only way the state could come up with the money to make improvements is by taking it out of the construction budget.

The department announced Tuesday it was postponing bids on 56 statewide projects worth an estimated $112 million. Bennett said the AHTD is trying to be responsible because it needs $180 million in improvements so it is doling out the increases over 10 years. That’s so at least some construction projects can continue in the meantime — unless the federal government finds a solution.

Winter weather contributes to the decay of the highways, too. Frozen water will expand in cracks and fissures in the pavement causing damage; it’s why potholes are bigger after an ice storm.

Bennett said overlaying a road — putting down a new top layer of pavement — costs $200,000 a mile. Reconstructing the same road from the ground up costs $1.5 million a mile.

Bad roads “don’t always affect it during the cleaning unless you have a road that is really rutted,” Bennett said. “If you have a road that is really rutted, the plow blade is not going to rest flush on the pavement. The biggest thing is, if we can’t get out and maintain the roads the way we need to maintain them during the spring, summer and fall and they have cracks in them, then when the winter weather comes the water is going to get in them.”

Bennett said his wish list — other than an annual $18 million donation from a charitable benefactor — is the money to hire 200 more maintenance personnel and buy a fleet of belly plows, which can be used year-round after the blades are removed.

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