With the recent snowfall that Greene County has seen this week, the Secondary Roads Department was ready.

County Engineer Wade Weiss says there are 24 vehicles in their fleet, including 12 plow trucks and 12 maintainers. He notes, the plow trucks are responsible for clearing the paved county roads, while the maintainers primarily are used on gravel roads. Weiss says during a snow event, like Monday morning, the plows started clearing roads at 5am and the maintainers are not used unless there is at least four inches of snow. 

The plows apply a mix of salt and sand to provide traction for vehicles and melt any remaining snow and ice. Weiss says they typically use about 2,000 tons of material, with 700 tons of salt mixed with 1,200 tons of sand. This year, about 800 tons of salt was purchased through the county’s distributor in Kansas. However, Weiss tells Raccoon Valley Radio, last winter chewed up a lot of their material. 

“As a result of the winter, we had a lot of moist conditions going into the winter, (and) the roads got worse than anybody’s ever seen them. We’re just hoping that doesn’t happen again, that was very hard. We had a lot of people who were really good with the attitudes in the country especially because the situation was fairly treacherous, and we had roads that were impassable at times. We tried getting those corrected as soon as we could. But it was a task that was almost overwhelming at times.”  

Weiss adds they provide mixed materials to all of the communities in the county, including the City of Jefferson. He says the Secondary Roads Department is used whenever there are snow events in the county, including weekends and holidays.