Ready to show true grit

The overnight covering of snow in Lincoln (Monday/Tuesday) proves winter has arrived and Lincolnshire County Council’s gritting team has been busy.

A fleet of 47 gritters is used to treat 5,500 miles of Lincolnshire’s roads network with   30,000 tonnes of salt stored across eight county depots in our county.

The gritters often go out multiple times a day and prepare when road surface temperatures drop to around 0.5°C, covering nearly 2,000 miles of highway, including all A and B roads, at least one road into all main towns and villages, and routes around our bus and train stations, hospitals and schools.

Grit bins are also provided for residents to use on public paths and roads.

Darrell Redford is the Network Resilience Manager: “Looking after the roads in severe temperatures is a really complex job but we know what we’re doing and we’re ready to get out to increase grip. Our team is out in all hours to make the roads safer across the colder months.

"Our drivers are very talented at what they do. To back them up we use a host of data and live information to work out when and where to spread the right amount of salt – the men and women of the gritting team, plus that vital information is a combination that’s effective and efficient in keeping roads open in the worst conditions.

"It’s very clear that what we do with our gritting programme is important for everyone on the roads, but a large part of road safety also relies on everyone on the roads to drive in the right way for the conditions. It’s a simple message to all: be safe, be aware and be kind to other road users.”

Data science is the starting point for Darrell and his teams:  “We have a lot of data coming to us all the time. We have our own 12 weather stations in Lincolnshire that we use and we also get information from another eight outside of the county that aren’t ours, but we use them as part of data share with other areas.

“This live reporting is very accurate and really helps us predict what weather fronts are moving across the area. There are two stations in each domain, which are: the Wolds, the Coast, Grantham and Grantham Ridge, Lincoln Ridge and the Fens.”

The county’s undulating landscape causes a wide range of temperature values to deal with.

“We see temperatures in the Wolds drop dramatically. They can go down a lot,” adds Darrell: “And across the fens temperatures tends to remain quite high.”

This exact level of critical live information means that the gritting team can be equally as exact about when, and where, they put the salt down. The lower the temperature, the more salt is needed for a specific spreading area.

He continues: “We have something called route-based forecasting where each route has its own forecast, based on the specific domains. This means that we can send out the appropriate gritters for the appropriate areas as needed. That alone save us a lot of money and resource.

“It’s very important that we know what areas are at what temperatures too. When the road temperature is down to -2 we spread 7g of salt per square metre, between -2 and -5 we salt at 12g, at -5 to -10 that figure goes up to 17g of spread and when snow is on the road, or the temperature is lower than -10 then we go to the maximum 20g per square metre. Knowing exactly where, when and how much salt to spread anywhere in the county is an exact science and it saves us a lot of cash.”

Lincolnshire’s Gritter Crew – the stats

• The county has a budget of £1.2m a year for salt. Last year the council spent £1,000,000 on the grippy stuff. The molasses-treated salt that is bought in will last for five years – this lifespan had never been tested though as the salt stored is always used well before the five years is up
• There are 47 Gritters that serve the county – these range from mainly 26-tonne gritters with 10-tonne hoppers,18-tonne lorries with 6-tonne hoppers on the back and smaller 10-tonne versions with a 3-tonne hopper on the back
• Lincolnshire County Council holds 29,200 tonnes of salt in the county’s depots
• On average, Lincolnshire County Council uses 20,000 tonnes of salt a year
• The most salt ever used in one winter was across the 2010/11 ‘Beast from the East’ brutally cold season. That year a massive 38,000 tonnes of salt was put down on the roads
• There are 12 weather stations around the county feeding data back about the weather and road temperatures. Lincolnshire County Council has access to eight others sited with other counties which help to more accurately predict weather systems as they come across the country