BENTONVILLE — Benton County officials are gearing up for the next severe weather event with December’s storm still fresh in their minds.
Terry Nalley was hired in September as public services administrator, a job that includes overseeing the Road Department. Nalley, who has a history in construction, said dealing with severe weather was new to him.
At A Glance
Up In Missouri
The Missouri Department of Transportation uses beet juice mixed with salt brine to help the salt brine work at lower temperatures to treat icy or snow packed surfaces. The department uses a 80 percent salt brine and 20 percent beet juice mix in most areas. The beet juice needs salt brine to melt ice. At 30 degrees, one pound of salt will melt 46.3 pounds of ice, but at 0 degrees, the same pound of salt will melt just 3.7 pounds of ice. Regular water-based salt brine works well until 25 degrees. Beet juice is added to the mix between 25 degrees and 5 degrees.
Source: Missouri Department Of Transportation
“There has been learning curve,” he said. “Most of our crew has been here for some time. I’ve been in charge of multimillion-dollar projects, but I never had to be responsible for clearing hundreds of miles of road of ice and snow. I put that all on me.”
The department is responsible for 1,755 miles of roads, according to Cindy Jones, road coordinator. Of that, 846 miles are dirt, 104 miles paved with chip and seal and 805 miles are asphalt.
Nalley and Jones said the county mobilizes manpower, equipment and material needed to handle severe weather. Thursday morning, the department called its 10 “first responders” to salt and sand some bridges and intersections after a light snowfall, Nalley said. Leaving aside two office workers, all of the department’s 71 employees are subject to 12-hour shifts to keep the department working, Nalley said. That was done in the December storm until the persistent subfreezing temperatures made it necessary to scale back the effort, he said.
“With the equipment we have, if the temperatures are below 20 to 25 degrees and there’s more than an inch of ice, we just can’t bust it,” Nalley said. “In December we initially had 2 to 2 1/2 or 3 inches of ice with snow on top of that. After we got some traffic on it and it got packed down, we were working with 4 inches of solid ice in some spots.”
The department typically has 12 trucks assigned to winter storms with six of those being large dump trucks with snowplows, Nalley said. Six pickups with spreaders mounted on the back of the trucks are used to spread sand and salt on roads and bridges. The county also operates 15 road graders to clear ice and snow.
The December storm led to a review of winter weather plans and some changes were made, Nalley said. The department will now use a different mixture of salt and sand, increasing the percentage of salt in the mix. The county is still looking at using salt brine and beet juice used by other agencies, but the county doesn’t have the equipment for that method, Nalley said. He's looking for an economically feasible method of using salt brine and beet juice.
“We’re not in the Snow Belt,’” Nalley said. “It doesn’t make sense to spend $250,000 for one of those liquid spreader trucks and use it just once or twice a year.”
Randy Ort with the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department said the state uses salt brine and beet juice. The state keeps the mix stored in 6,000-gallon tanks, which cost about $4,200 each, Ort said. The mixture costs the state $1.51 per gallon, Ort said. As an alternative to the more expensive tanker trucks, Ort said the state also uses smaller sprayers, similar to those used to spray roadside vegetation, that can be mounted on pickup trucks. Those systems cost about $500 each, he said.
Mike McKenzie, justice of the peace for District 1, which includes much of eastern Benton County, said he’d gotten a mix of comments about the county’s handling of the December storm,
“People I know would bring it up in conversations,” McKenzie said. “The thing is you’d have to dig down a little bit to find out what roads they were talking about. Some of the comments were about state highways and city roads.”
The department also received calls about state highways and city streets, Jones said. The county can’t work on state highways and only works on city streets if the county and city agree, said County Judge Bob Clinard. Nalley said he received several complaints about the ice on the street in front of the department.
“People would see our trucks leaving the yard here, and they’d call to say, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything?’ But 102 is a state highway, and the responsibility for that is with the state Highway Department,” he said. “We can do work in the cities, and we have. In December, Pea Ridge had their grader go down, and the county sent one to help out. But I called the judge first to make sure he had approved it.”
The Road Department has maps on the county website showing which roads will be worked on with trucks and which will be worked on with graders, Jones said. The department’s phone number and email addresses for supervisors are also listed. Jones said anyone can call or email reports of problems at any time during a winter storm.
“We would ask that people, if they have a concern, be sure they’re calling the appropriate department,” she said.