Gritters at the ready as winter looms (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Gritters at the ready as winter looms

3:17pm Thursday 20th November 2008 in Local Video By Kathie Griffiths

Bradford Council’s road maintenance crews are on stand-by to keep roads safe with temperatures set to plummet this weekend.

The district’s 33 gritting machines are ready to roll if the call comes, pledges Steve Eddison, the man responsible for keeping roads ice-free.

The gritters have 760 miles of road to cover, helped by a salt mountain piled high with 10,000 tonnes.

The bulk of it – 8,500 tonnes – is coated, surprisingly, with sweet molasses to help make the 6mm grains stick to the road surfaces.

“It’s got quite a strange aroma to it,” said Mr Eddison. “You can definitely smell it. In some rural areas we’ve had problems with sheep trying to lick it off the roads.”

The rest of the grit is made up of 10mm grains only to be used in the snow. “In an average winter we could use 8,000 tonnes of the stuff,” Mr Eddison said.

Bradford’s gritter force has 18 machines kept solely for gritting, eight dual-purpose vehicles which double up for highway maintenance work as well, two small gritters to use in guided bus lanes and on weak bridges and five privately-owned vehicles and drivers it can hire.

The gritters are kept in five depots across the district: at Wakefield Road in Bradford, Queensbury, Denholme, Stockbridge at Keighley and Ilkley.

From October to April, the men and women at the district’s depots are on ice-alert, keeping a regular watch on daily forecasts from the Met Office.

“There’s a bit of a formula thing that goes on before we decide to grit,” said Mr Eddison. “We look at temperatures, rain, snow, ice, hoar frost, dry, damp and whether we’ve just been out to grit or not. Once the decision to go for it is made, it’s over to the duty engineer who starts the gritters rolling.

“When they are out on the road, we can track every vehicle on its route and how much grit it’s spreading.

“It’s also handy for checking up on complaints.”

Recent research by the Highways Agency showed 50 per cent of us would still set out on a journey even after a severe weather warning – and a third would do it without checking their cars first.

Saturday's temperatures could fall as low as two degrees centigrade with a possible scattering of icy sleet on Sunday.