Warm up the gritters and unearth your snow ploughs: winter is coming. While the leaves might not have yet begun to brown, councils across the country are finding innovative solutions for the colder months ahead.
Despite another difficult year for town hall budgets, winter preparations for highways are once again pushing the envelope. Novel solutions to gritting, inventive new equipment and recommendations from Appendix H of the Well-Maintained Highways document will this year support the nation as it battles against ice, snow and flooding.
In the run up to what transpired to be a relatively mild winter, councils last year invested heavily in extra gritting salt, equipment and social media use. Figures from the Local Government Association reveal town halls increased their gritting salt stocks to 1.4m tonnes by the end of October, while 40% bought full sized gritters.
Salt is high on this year’s agenda for Scotland’s Dumfries and Galloway Council, as Mike Fawkes, service manager for roads, explains. Having trialled additives and treatments in previous years, the local authority will this winter begin to move into using Safecoat salt. New stock coming into the council at the end of summer and beginning of autumn will all be treated in this manner.
‘It is because of the price efficiencies,’ Mr Fawkes says. ‘For us alone, last winter - which was by no means a severe one - savings in the region of £140,000 to £150,000 on our winter budget if we had been utilising Safecote and following the Appendix H guidelines.’
The region has also recently completed a new salt barn in preparation for the upcoming season, an addition Mr Fawkes says is particularly important given rollout of other innovations.
‘Now we are operating with five fully covered locations. It’s more so that we have a lot more control over the moisture levels within the salt. Especially when we are moving to Safecote additive, a vital part of the storage is that it’s kept within covered areas,’ he says.
Dumfries and Galloway hasn’t indicated that it wants to reduce its winter service budget, yet is forecast to achieve a number of financial efficiencies over the coming months thanks to the salt treatment.
In light of the Appendix H recommendations, the council is looking into using brine for high footfall pedestrian areas. While the finer details are yet to be established, the treatment is likely to replace white treated salt on these routes.
‘We trialled it at a couple of locations previously and the results were very good, so we’re expanding that to our prime sites,’ Mr Fawkes says.
Dumfries and Galloway could also soon be adding a rubber attachment to the bottom of its snow ploughs in a bid to improve performance, with product trials continuing this year. The rubber base with ceramic insert improves efficiency in removing snow from the road.
‘The performance of last year was very good when the product was actually needed, so we’ll be giving that a further check over this year. If it’s tested a bit more this winter there’s a potential we’ll look to employ those on most of our snow ploughs,’ Mr Fawkes says.
Focus will continue to be directed towards local community resilience. Equipment such as push handle pedestrian gritters and snow shovels have been provided to help residents support themselves. Mr Fawkes says communities can now function ‘as a mechanism for reporting specific issues or problem locations’.
‘They act as a conduit for that information to come into our area framework team,’ he adds.
At the other end of the country, Hampshire CC is also poised to enjoy a winter of impressive salt stockpiles after years of improvement. Head of highways, Tim Laughton, says last year’s mild temperatures and flooding saw only around 8,000 tonnes of salt used – well under the 20,000 tonnes deployed in the previous two seasons.
‘As a consequence of the bad winters and the salt shortages we experienced around four, five years ago, we increased our storage and now have a total capacity of around 25,000 tonnes. It’s almost a doubling of capacity.’ he says.
‘We learned the lessons of the bad winters of 2008 and 2009. We’ve got one new 6,000 tonne facility that was commissioned in August. We reconstructed one of the existing barns to increase the capacity slightly.’
Amey works as Hampshire’s term service contractor, procuring salt, ensuring stocks are maintained and deploying equipment. New technology to be introduced this year could also improve organisation of staff across the winter service programme.
‘For this season, Amey has got eight dedicated spreaders, which are GPS controlled,’ Mr Laughton says. ‘Anyone with an HGV licence could jump into the lorry and drive the route. The vehicle gives instructions and controls for salt dispersal as well.
‘That’s new for this season and on eight of 45 priority one routes,’ he adds.
Mr Laughton admits that while Appendix H remains ‘quite unwieldy in terms of the advice it gives’, the advice is being taken into account through treatment strategies.
‘Some of the recommendations will be longer term. So as we procure new equipment or if we should go to a new contract arrangement, then we can look to embrace some of the wider things from Appendix H,’ he adds.
Cllr Seán Woodward, Hampshire CC’s executive member for economy, transport and environment, adds: ‘Throughout the past year Hampshire has invested heavily in repairing and maintaining the 5,000 plus miles of roads in the county following last year’s high winds and heavy rainfall, which caused around £36m worth of damage. With £17.5m in government funding we were able to start work in earnest with extra gangs, machinery and equipment.
‘Hampshire also adopts a longterm management approach in the way the roads are repaired. This means the highway network is managed as an asset with decisions of what treatment needs to be carried out, at what time, based on “whole life” costings to reduce expensive reactive repairs in the future. If we hadn’t adopted this approach, the effect of the winter on the roads would have been much worse.’
While both Dumfries and Galloway and Hampshire have to deal with the significant rural challenges of winter, colder months in the capital also offer a range of different tests.
Veolia covers winter maintenance operations in eleven London boroughs across six months of the year. Transport manager, Gary Gregory, outlines how the contractor has invested in nine new winter vehicles for this season. These will be used across all the boroughs working with the company.
‘The life expectancy of a gritter can rage to anything between 10 and 15 years because of the limited use that it gets,’ Mr Gregory says.
‘Veolia has invested in over 25 bits of new kit. We’ve got a fleet size of 42 in London, 25 of them are new vehicles we have purchased over the last 18 months.’
The company has around £4m of assets based in London alone, he adds. A minimum of 5,500 tonnes of salt are held throughout the year, which is on an automatic re-order system.
Surrey CC is this winter introducing an innovative technique to ensure the region’s vehicles can be more effectively deployed. Maintenance plan team leader, Simon Mitchell, says the fleet supplied by Econ is one of the ‘newest in the country’.
‘This year we’ve fitted all the vehicles with tags so when they go over
