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In Canton, Potsdam and elsewhere in St. Lawrence County, road crews prepare for winter

Posted 11/14/10

By CRAIG FREILICH Road salt price is down for the second year in a row, easing the burden a bit on public works and highway departments in the Canton-Potsdam area as preparation for winter is …

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In Canton, Potsdam and elsewhere in St. Lawrence County, road crews prepare for winter

Posted

By CRAIG FREILICH

Road salt price is down for the second year in a row, easing the burden a bit on public works and highway departments in the Canton-Potsdam area as preparation for winter is underway.

Meanwhile, public works crews have been stockpiling thousands of tons of sand, readying trucks and plows, and topping off fire hydrants with anti-freeze in preparation for the North Country winter.

“Salt is $50.12 a ton delivered to our shed from the Port of Ogdensburg,” said Town of Canton Highway Superintendent Terry Billings. “That’s down $13 from last year.”

Billings says the department has put away 180 tons in its shed. “We refill it through the season as needed. Typically, we use 900 to 1,100 tons of salt a season.” He also says about 4,000 yards of sand is piled and ready.

Village of Potsdam Public Works Superintendent Bruce Henderson agrees that the price for salt is considerably lower than it in the recent past.

“It took a big jump two years ago. It was $85.74 a ton in ’08-’09, $65.62 in ’09-’10, and is $50.92 this year,” Henderson said. Most of the salt the village uses goes onto the portions of state highways – Routes 11, 11B and 56 – that are in the village, and which the village keeps in shape during snow season through the contract the county has with the state and, in turn, the county has with villages and towns.

In preparing for the snowfall, “we put in about 2,000 tons of sand with 10 percent salt” for village streets, Henderson said. The price of sand is up a little bit this year, he says.

The Potsdam department takes care of 22 lane-miles of state highway in the village, along with the village’s own 32 lane-miles of streets and 30 miles of sidewalks.

Billings says the Town of Canton doesn’t plow state roads, but takes care of its own 96 miles of town roads and five miles of village streets in Rensselaer Falls.

Billings says the town keeps eight trucks ready for plowing and sanding, “and seven of the eight are all harnessed and ready to go. The eighth horse we will keep ready for whatever construction and maintenance projects we can do before we need it for plowing” – including repairing potholes, which can pop up at this time of year almost as much as in the spring, he says, because of temperature changes and wet conditions in “this seasonal transition period.”

Beaver Watch

One thing Billings and his crews like to keep an eye on as winter approaches is activity by beavers that might jam up a road culvert or fill a roadside ditch.

“We need to check them every couple of days. We have a couple of trappers on call. If the beavers are plaguing road culverts or blocking ditches, we call in the trappers. They can pull two, three or four beavers at a time out of a given area.

“That makes for big cost savings,” compared to what crews might have to do to restore or repair plugged road pipes or washed-out stretches of blacktop. Billings says it is especially important this season because we have had so much rain over the last two months.

The Village of Potsdam has a variety of motorized equipment it uses to push, pile, treat and haul the snow and ice that falls in the course of a season.

There are four trucks fitted with stainless steel sander boxes and plows. There is a road grader, “for when we get heavier snows, over five or six inches. That’s a handy tool. It’s capable of moving a lot of snow,” Superintendent Henderson said.

Variety of Vehicles

There are two snow blowers that can be mounted on the village’s big front-end loaders. The older one is used for village streets downtown, parking lots and side streets. A new one, which arrived in March too late for last winter, is to be used at the airport. Ninety percent of its $90,000 cost has been covered by a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The loaders the village has are “TC” or “tool carriers,” meaning they can be fitted with a number of attachments, such as the usual scoop bucket, or a snow blower attachment, or an 11-foot two-way plow that the village uses in parking lots such as the large one at the Pine Street Arena, and at the airport.

There are also machines that are used to clear sidewalks, two Bobcats and a more powerful trackless vehicle.

“And we have a red pickup truck we use as a sander and plow on the sidewalks downtown, from Park Street to Market and Main to Elm,” Henderson said. The broader sidewalks in the downtown district make the truck’s use practical.

“It is all up and running because we can’t just wait for the snow to fall,” said Henderson.

In addition to flushing the lines, village crews top off all 215 fire hydrants in the village with anti-freeze, but not the kind people put in their automobiles.

“That’s toxic,” Henderson said, and they can’t risk having any of it reaching the regular water lines, so they use a kind that people use in the drinking water systems of recreational vehicles.

The total of hydrants is up, to include the several new hydrants at Lowe’s and at Potsdam High School.

The public works crews in Potsdam will go on three shifts from Nov. 21 to April 3, to make sure they’re covered at all times. Henderson says there is always work for them, whether it is clearing snow from parking lots overnight, clearing the area around fire hydrants to be certain the fire department can find them and use them if they need to, or keeping up with vehicle and other maintenance.

About $15,000 in the public works budget is set aside for overtime plowing, a typical annual allotment, Henderson says.