You can forgive Arkansas Department of Transportation folks for thinking that the January weekend the winter storm hit the state was the longest month of their lives.
While many Arkansans were stuck at home after the storm dumped anywhere from 8 inches to a foot of snow and sleet throughout the state, the hardy men and women of ARDOT had no such luxury. ARDOT Director Jared Wiley said the division’s workforce of about 2,700 worked 12-hour rotating shifts for a week before and after the storm hit.
Based on those unofficial numbers, ARDOT employees put in about 227,000 hours of work during the storm.
“It will be a substantial overtime payment [stemming from] this storm for our staff, but they earned it,” Wiley said.
There was plenty of advance warning, with forecasts predicting a severe impact a week before the first snowflake fell Jan. 23.
After a brief respite, the second round of snow and sleet hit Jan. 24, shutting down much of the state for several days.
“They pretreated a couple days before the storm, and when the storm hit on Friday, they switched to around-the-clock operations,” Wiley said. “That carried on in most districts until Saturday, but it went well. It was long, hard days.
“Folks were tired, but spirits were high because they knew they were making an impact. So overall, man, I could not be prouder of how our team performed.”
ARDOT had about 78,000 cubic yards of salt in 121 salt houses spread through the state before the storm. The department also had at its disposal 700 snowplows and 600 salt spreaders.
Wiley said crews went through about half of the state’s salt pile during the storm.
The heavy equipment also burned through the diesel allotment to the point Wiley was beginning to worry that they might not have enough fuel to last through the storm.
“It’s certainly, I think, the most impactful storm in the past decade,” Wiley said. “We had a big storm in the 2013-2014 time range. That storm really inspired us to invest more in equipment needed to fight winter weather.
“This was certainly a widespread storm, with record amounts of sleet. We saw material that was hard to work with once it got hard-packed. It was a challenge for us. This storm certainly rivals anything I’ve seen in my 20-year career.”
Arkansas is dense with roadways and has more than 16,400 miles of highways and interstates.
“Some people sometimes don’t understand the amount of miles we have and the amount of plows,” Wiley said. “You hear us talking about 700 plows — that sounds like a lot of plows.
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“We really do have a large system compared to the population base and the revenue base of our state.”
As with any disaster plan, priorities were determined. ARDOT ranked the state’s Tier 1 interstates and highways so that it could clear the most-traveled roadways first.
One complication — as if a foot of sleet and snow weren’t enough — was the daylong break between the first snow Friday evening and the follow-up heavier snow Saturday night. Had all the precipitation occurred at once, it would have been easier and quicker to clear rather than having to reclear stretches multiple times.
“Northwest got more snow; central Arkansas and south Arkansas [got] more sleet, some freezing rain,” Wiley said. “Getting a good base layer of pretreatment out there, getting a good salt coverage on our infrastructure, really helped.
“Ideally, though, we get that base layer down and we plow and we plow once. When you’re out there, replowing and redoing work you’ve already done, it certainly adds another layer of complexity and challenge when you have additional snow on a roadway that’s already been snowed on.”
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