No weather plan in place

THE hardship of last winter’s severe frost may not be a thing of the past, as this week a senior council engineer admitted the council does not yet have a plan in place to deal with similar conditions if they were to happen again this winter.

Speaking at a meeting of North Clare councillors, senior engineer Tom Tiernan admitted the local authority did not supply sand or grit to the public quick enough during the severe frost last winter but stated that a strategy to deal with incidents of prolonged severe weather had not yet been finalised because the council is “conscious of things going on nationally”.
He said the Department of Transport has completed a review, which made 27 recommendations for public authorities and organisations relating to situations of flood and frost. He pointed out there is a further document to be issued in October and until then, Clare County Council would not be finalising its winter maintenance strategy. The current stance within the local authority is that “we will start as we finished last year,” he added.
Fine Gael Councillor Joe Arkins was particularly vocal in advocating for grit provision at sites around the county.
“The difficulty is that there are only so many roads that we can salt. A lot of people living in rural areas have difficulties getting to salted roads,” he pointed out.
Councillor Arkins said he understood there is greater salt silo capacity this year, a development he welcomed. “We need to look at areas where we can put a quantity of grit where locals or groups or volunteers can get to it,” he stated.
“If there were grit dumps, community groups or volunteers could have gritted the roads and it would have saved a lot of hardship,” he claimed.
Councillor Arkins said it was “lucky” that the freeze happened over the Christmas period, “because people didn’t have to go to work and had large quantities of food and drink in their houses”.
Fianna Fáil Councillor Richard Nagle said members of the electorate had also approached him about the provision of grit. He recalled that a number of roads were “closed for 10 days and if the grit was available at the beginning of the freeze that would not have happened”.
Mr Tiernan said, “Last winter when it got to a certain point, there were 40 locations where grit was supplied and distributed”.
“Even though we were one of the first in the country to do this, we were still later responding than we should have been. We will have to look at that,” he added.
Councillor Arkins stated the local authority must get grit distributed around the county before a prolonged cold snap. “We have to have the grit out first because when it freezes we can’t get to these places,” he stated.
Councillor Michael Hillery raised the question of insurance, enquiring about liability if the council is to provide grit at sites, if a member of the public dispensed this and there was subsequently an accident.
“There are legal issues around this and we have to make sure we are protected,” Mr Tiernan responded.
Councillor Richard Nagle said he had spoken to people who “were housebound effectively and desperate”, unable to leave their homes during the bad weather.
“You are not asking people to grit roads. You are providing the grit and salt if they want to do it themselves,” he commented.
Mr Tiernan said that appropriate measures will be taken if there is a future “prolonged” spell of freezing conditions.