Local highway authorities were ready to spread salt during the late October cold snap, despite this being a rare occurrence in southern England.
Winter maintenance officers said the need for salt to be spread in the last week of October underlined that the number of salting runs required remained fairly constant, despite the fact that winters were usually milder now than the 1971-2000 average.
Cambridgeshire County Council said salt had not been spread in October ‘for a number of years’, which had prompted a decision to formally shorten the period covered by the winter maintenance contract last year.
Contractor Atkins is now retained from 1 November to 15 April, but in the understanding that runs might be required outside this shorter season, at an additional cost.
Richard Kingston, area manager for maintenance, said the decision had still been ‘the right one’. He added: ‘Even having made four runs this October, we’re still spending less than when we retained a contractor for four weeks. There was no operational issue that prevented us responding.’
While temperatures were not as low as in previous decades, there were more ‘marginal nights’ throughout the season when temperatures were around zero, stressed Kingston. This, combined with the ‘duty to grit’ introduced in 2003, meant runs could not be reduced, he said. Salt Union are maintaining Cambridgeshire’s salt levels this winter. Four hundred tonnes of salt had been used in the four runs in October, out of a total in county depots of 6,000-7,000t.
David Davies, Lincolnshire County Council’s principal maintenance engineer, said: ‘We’re not getting a reduction in the number of nights where the temperature is at, or close to, zero.’ Two runs were frequently required in one evening, he said, when temperatures rose, but then fell again. Lincolnshire made three salting runs in the last week of October, each time using 220t of pre-wet salt, after the Met Office predicted sub-zero temperatures.
Oxfordshire County Council also spreaded salt across its priority roads on the evening of the 28th and morning of the 29th, despite the fact that its planned operations ‘do not normally swing into action until mid-November,’ according to Cllr Ian Hudspeth, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for transport. In line with Davies’ comments over the challenges of marginal nights, a second salt-spreading run was required in some areas in the morning.
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