From The Detroit News:

Oakland road boss: We'll review response to storm
Brent O. Bair / Road Commission for Oakland County

There has been a lot of discussion over the last couple days about the condition of roads in Oakland County following Sunday's storm. While we appreciate and share the frustration of motorists, and support the right of citizens to freely express their opinions, unfortunately, some of those opinions were based on incorrect assumptions or on partial information. I'd like to take this opportunity to address some of the concerns that have been raised.

First, a brief explanation of what happened. This was a particularly challenging storm for several reasons. When the storm started, it began with rain and temperatures in the 30s. By late afternoon Sunday, the temperatures were dropping like a stone and the rain had turned to heavy snow.

We had 106 trucks on the road beginning at 2:30 a.m. Sunday when it became apparent the snow was about to hit. Those drivers remained on the road until Sunday night [[16 hours later), when they were required to take a break.

Because of revenue drops, we have nearly 50 fewer plow/salt truck drivers today than in 2007, which meant we had far fewer drivers to hop in the trucks and keep them on the road after the first shift drivers went on break. The decline in revenue has also prevented us from being able to replace our aging trucks as we should have, meaning they began breaking down more frequently under the heavy burden of operating around the clock in extremely harsh conditions.

This situation was made worse by the fact that the temperatures quickly plummeted to between 7 and 9 degrees as the sun went down Sunday evening. This rendered our salt essentially useless. It also caused many of the roads that we had been salting all day — and thus were covered in snow and ice melt by sundown, to quickly refreeze into shimmering sheets of ice. Because the salt would not work, there was nothing we could do to eradicate the ice until Monday morning, when the sun came up and the temperatures rose again.

During the day Monday, we threw all available drivers at the clean-up process, and made great strides. Unfortunately, when the sun went down, the temperatures again dropped to the mid-single digits. This again caused any road that was moist to refreeze. Again, there was nothing we could do about this, due to the temperatures.

Tuesday and Wednesday, during daylight hours, we continued to make great progress on getting the snow and ice cleaned up. Even though we continued to have some re-freeze issues at night, there were fewer problem spots each night.

Could we have handled the storm differently? Frankly, we don't know. While we believe our fleet managers made the best decisions they could with the information and resources available, we will be reviewing our operations to see if we could have made a tweak here or there that might have improved the roads.

Please understand our highest priority is to provide safe roads for motorists. We are 100 percent committed to doing what it takes to ensure we do that, to the degree we can with the recourse available to us.

We have also heard in the wake of this storm that other counties handled this storm better than we did. So, after hearing this comment, we contacted the county road agencies in our surrounding counties.

What we heard from them is that they responded in a very similar manner as we did to the storm, and that they experienced the very same problems. Several even noted that they were hearing from their residents that Oakland County roads were in better shape than the roads in their county.

Another question we have heard frequently is 'why didn't we use sand after the salt stopped working due to the temperatures?' The answer is we did use sand, though we used it sparingly. The problem with sand in urbanized areas is that where there are storm sewers, the sand will clog them, likely leading to flooding when the snow and ice melts.

Additionally, placing sand on paved roads creates another problem: Once the snow and ice melts and the road dries, the sand remains and can actually become a safety hazard itself, because it causes the roads to be slippery. In particular, this can be an issue at intersections when motorists attempt to stop and end up sliding on the sand.

Brent O. Bair is Managing Director for the Road Commission for Oakland County. His office can be reached at [[248) 645-2000.


From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20101216/...#ixzz18Ko7ANnp