The Iowa DOT’s winter operations director says the blizzard last week ended up causing more damage to private vehicles than state plow trucks.
Craig Bargfrede saw a single-day record for snowplows hit by cars on February 12th, but there were no records last week. “Well, thankfully, during this last blizzard event, we only saw a couple of incidents where we had trucks hit as a result of being out there doing our job,” he says. Bargfrede says they have been fortunate that most of the accident weren’t severe. “Minor damage that we were able to basically repair and get the trucks back out on the road. The only one of those two incidents, one of the trucks was pulling a brine trailer, and that Brian trailer did end up upside down in the ditch. So we we do have some damage to that,” Bargfrede says.
Bargfrede says there was more damage to private vehicles as multiple pile ups between, cars, trucks and semis forced the closing of several roadways during the blizzard.
“This is another prime example where the traveling public really need to pay attention and heed the warnings of the State Patrol and the DOT. When we say travel not advised due to the conditions out there, people need to really heed those warnings,” he says. “It’s a dangerous situation, and it’s an ultimate safety issue for the public.”
Barfrede says the amount of snow wasn’t the problem. “The pavement itself, for the most part, was in fairly decent condition. It was just the visibility and the winds that we were dealing with that there was no visibility. I had numerous operators comment that they could, they could basically just see the front edge of the of the hood of the truck, the front plow and beyond. That wasn’t much, much more for visibility,” he says.
Bargfrede says their stockpiles of salt and sand have been more than enough in a drier than normal winter. “When we talk about the actual material usage for this winter season, it’s down based on the winter season or lack of winter season that we’ve had this year. We’re in the process now that we this last event of putting in orders and basically coming out of the winter season, topping off all of our sheds,” Bargfrede says.
He says the warm up has some district offices already prepping for pothole maintenance. “This, this huge fluctuation in temperatures naturally going to cause a number of those situations to come up. So, I’m pretty positive that a lot of the garages that have those kind of situations are going to be out taking care of those potholes as quickly as possible,” Bargfrede says. Bargfrede says its all part of the cycle as they go from winter operations to spring.