Crews at the Starke County Highway Department have been working on maintaining the snow plows and hauling more sand in between snow events this week.
Highway Superintendent Rik Ritzler said some of the plows in the fleet underwent maintenance during this quiet time.
“We had one day this winter where we had five trucks go down and we have five spares,” said Ritzler. “If one more truck went down, we were going to have an area without a truck. We were a little worried about that. In this lull period, the mechanics have gotten caught up. Right now we have five spares ready to go and all trucks are running pretty well.”
He noted that there are 16 snow plow driver areas in the county.
“We also have a smaller dump truck that does the Koontz Lake and Bass Lake areas and some of the subdivision areas, and we have anywhere from two or three pickups throughout the county in subdivision areas as well. We expanded that a little bit this year and we’re going to do it again next year.”
Despite the amount of snow the area has gotten, Ritzler said the highway department has a good supply of road salt.
“We were lucky. The last two years the winters have been relatively mild. What we’ve done – we go through the state bid. As part of the bid, we put in how much salt we think we’re going to need. Because of the bulk, we get a lot lower prices that way. We have to get 80 percent or 120 percent of what we bid. In a lot of places, because they didn’t need to use much salt the last two years, they just got their 80 percent minimum. We decided to get our 120 percent maximum and store the salt here. Even though we’ve used more salt this winter we’re still way below our quota for this year.”
In 2014, the county almost ran out of salt with all of the snow events that year.
Ritzler said the crews have been busy catching up the sand supply to get ready for more snow. Accumulating snow is predicted in the forecast for Saturday.
