Please refer to the homepage for updates on severe weather warnings.
People often wake up to a severe frost, scrape ice off their car and are then surprised to find that the roads have not been salted.
This is because action is taken on the ROAD temperature being at or below freezing rather than the AIR temperature. Roads retain heat and do not cool down nearly as quickly as objects such as cars, and so frost on a car can be a misleading guide to whether salting is needed on the roads.
When To Salt
Salting is likely when road temperatures are at or below 1°C, and moisture is present or likely to be present to form ice.
Frost does not usually affect road surfaces until late evening or early morning so whenever possible salting is carried out overnight and outside periods where road traffic is heavy.
Great care is taken when applying salt to ensure that the appropriate rates of spread are used.
Winter maintenance vehicles are extremely powerful and have to distribute the salt across the full width of the carriageway.
Drivers are therefore asked to keep a safe distance when following a salting vehicle, and to exercise great care when overtaking
The Winter Season
The winter season will commence on 1 November 2011 and full standby arrangements will be in place until 31 March 2012.
If adverse conditions occur outside of that period, contingency arrangements will be in place to respond accordingly.
Our objectives are:
- To minimise delays, accidents and damage resulting from ice and snow.
- To undertake winter service effectively and efficiently.
- To try to prevent ice from forming on priority routes by precautionary gritting.
- To melt ice and snow already formed by post-gritting.
- To remove snow causing an obstruction.
- It will not be possible to cover all routes at all times, and the following plan is based on prioritisation based on a risk analysis.
However given the scale of financial and other resources involved in delivering the Winter Service and the obvious difficulties in maintaining high levels of plant utilisation for specialist equipment, it is not practically possible either to:
- provide the service on all parts of the network;
- ensure running surfaces are kept free of ice or snow at all times, even on the treated parts of the network.
In these circumstances, in order to comply with the changes in legislation, it will be necessary to undertake risk assessments to establish which routes should be included in a programme of treatment during inclement weather.
In particular, the treatment of footways must be fully addressed taking account of risk to all highway users and consideration of the available resources.
It will not be possible cover all routes at all times therefore priority roads such as main roads will be gritted first.