File photo/Rhonda Silence Cook County snowplows were taxed by the heavy, wet, snow of the Christmas 2009 storm.
The following is a statement by
Cook County Highway Department
Maintenance Supervisor Russell
Klegstad regarding how the county
handles snow and ice on the roads.
Cook County does not have a bare pavement policy. The policy is simply that users should drive according to conditions. We do, however, put forth the best effort to keep the roads safe and in a comfortable driving condition.
The Christmas storm brought very wet snow and even areas of rain and sleet. Cook County uses a sand/salt mix with a ratio of around 8% salt. (The higher the level of salt, the higher the corrosion effect to vehicles). We at times will raise the percentage of salt, but with the temperatures remaining in the single digits it will have very little effect— salt does not have a significant value until temperatures get into the 20s.
Cook County has 12 snowplow units (four graders and eight trucks) to meet the needs of Grand Marais, Grand Portage, Lutsen, Tofte, Schroeder, and the remaining rural areas of Cook County. The staff has to cover over 300 miles of road plus focus on city streets and lend aid to the communities within our county’s borders. Our goal is always to provide the best service we can in the quickest time frame possible. Following is the schedule for snow removal:
Day 1:
Municipalities, school bus routes, and primary county roads.
Day 2:
Secondary county roads, parking lots, and turnoffs.
Day 3:
Cleanup, widening banks back, sanding needed areas.
Under most circumstances by the close of day 3 all county roads and areas of responsibility should have been addressed. Then on day 4 we will usually do a follow-up on problem areas such as shaded curves, hills and crossings. We use this time also to have our road graders scrape the routes that are plowed by trucks without underbody blades. Several of our older trucks are not equipped with underbody blades and this puts them at a serious disadvantage when trying to keep their routes scraped clear of ice and hard packed snow. This is a problem that we hope to clear up as we upgrade the fleet of plow trucks in the coming years.
On Tuesday, January 5, we were finally forced into changing out our cutting edges for new ones with teeth. It is not something that we want to do without a lot of thought; while they work well for the gravel roads, they must be used with care on the blacktop roads because they can cause a lot of damage if they catch loose blacktop or unforeseen items such as manholes. We will spend a few days roughing up the ice with these and then go back to the standard cutting edges. The grooves created by these blades serve two purposes: They cut all the way through the layer of ice and help expose the road bed underneath, and they cause ridges to be left on the ice surface that helps hold the salt sand in place rather then it being simply blown to the side by passing traffic.
This year has also been a trying time for culverts freezing up and water making its way onto roadways and drives. We have been busy thawing culverts all season, but it will be a long winter of steady maintenance to keep up with these.
The fact remains that we are in northern Minnesota, and the inclement weather issues are a tradeoff for living in God’s Country.
If you have any questions or comments on the roads, or you see a culvert that is starting to back up and cause water issues, please feel free to call me at 218-387-3698, and I will try to address the issue in a timely fashion and help make the winter as painless as possible.
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