The state has spent more than $2.5 million to be as prepared as possible for future winter storms with more snow plows and other equipment and better coordination, state Department of Transportation officials said Thursday.
The effort followed last January’s disastrous ice storm that shut down most of metro Atlanta's road grid for about five days. Critics said state and local agencies didn’t plan and coordinate well enough, while DOT said it did all it could in the face of an enormous and unusual storm.
“We had a lot of issues on the roadway,” trying to clear roads during the January storm, said Eric Pitts, the state maintenance engineer. “We went back to the drawing board trying to figure out what we could do better.”
DOT has spent more than $2.5 million to replace worn-out equipment and increase its fleet of snow plows and spreaders by about 15 percent or 20 percent, said Pitts. DOT is adding spreaders and 112 plows, Pitts said. It is also adding 11 more storage locations for the salt and gravel mixture that DOT trucks spread, so that trucks will not have to travel so far. Some of the additions are in place, and some should arrive in November.
In addition, the agency has worked with state and local agencies to coordinate better. Where DOT used to have contact information for other transportation operations' agencies and decisionmakers dispersed at DOT offices, Pitts said, it now has the information updated and centralized.
And DOT now has a computerized map that all officials can look at which shows the top priority roads and locations for ice and snow clearance. Local officials have asked to be able to enter their own priorities into the map, and an upgrade should allow them to do that by next spring, Pitts said.
In general, the top priority roads for DOT are interstate highways, Pitts said, and DOT's goal is to keep two lanes passable on interstates at all times. That does not mean that people would be able to drive the speed limit in a storm such as January's, he said, but they would be able to drive through, carefully.
DOT also has brought in the private sector, contracting with 10 road builders to secure their help with equipment if necessary.
DOT officials said they spoke with transportation departments in other states that regularly handle severe winter weather, and the DOT officials said that some of the criticism thrown at DOT was unwarranted. While some experts interviewed last January said that it was important to stagger shift changes to leave some personnel on the roads to prevent cleared ice from building up again, Pitts said officials in two Midwestern states told him they disagreed, and did not do that.
Some issues remain.
DOT and some other agencies still use different electronic communications systems. However, DOT staff said that the Georgia Emergency Management Agency always has staff directly at DOT's storm headquarters during an emergency weather event, so they can communicate there.
And the new equipment will help, but it’s not enough, DOT officials said. DOT still has more than 800 maintenance vehicles that have more than 200,000 miles on them, said Tony Collins, the director of field services.
"We’re funding this stuff at the minimal level, the most critical needs," DOT's interim commissioner, Keith Golden, told the DOT board Thursday. However, he said, "there are a lot of needs."
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