Salt reserves until early next week says senior engineer

CLARE County Council is confident that it has sufficient reserves of salt with which to grit the main artery routes throughout the county, until at least beginning of next week.

The council says it is continuing to grit the main routes, which consist of approximately 13% of the entire road network in the county. However, it is only gritting back roads in exceptional circumstances, while footpaths are remaining relatively grit-free as people develop a habit of walking on the road in Ennis, rather than risk being upended on the icy pavements.
“We’re in a reasonable position at the moment in that we have enough salt to take us over the weekend and probably into the beginning of next week,” Clare County Council senior engineer Tom Tiernan told The Clare Champion on Wednesday evening.
“We are expecting more salt within the next couple of days. That should hopefully enhance that some little bit. At this moment in time, things are changing very little. Once temperatures remain at the level they are, there’s very, very little thaw activity,” he explained.
Mr Tiernan said Monday night’s rain resulted in road conditions deteriorating markedly, although they have improved somewhat since.
“Main roads have recovered over the past 36 hours from what occurred on Monday night, which basically was fairly intensive rain on top of the frozen surfaces. That exacerbated the situation and you had some critical situations in the county on Tuesday morning on the main roads that we have been regularly salting,” he said.
“But, because of the fact that weather has been dry since and those areas have been salted since then, that situation has recovered. So really we’re back to a situation where we have a reasonably clear main route network. Once you go off the main routes, then you have the same mix as you’ve had for the past few weeks; roads that are in varying levels of suitability for accommodating traffic,” Mr Tiernan stated.
Several vehicles were involved in a pile up on the N18 near Bunratty on Tuesday. The incident happened when a car veered out of control on black ice. Other cars also spun on the treacherous surface, leading to a road closure for a number of hours. Several other roads have been laden with ice throughout the county, with the Feakle-Killenana road particularly dangerous.
As regards back roads, Mr Tiernan says some are too dangerous to attempt gritting, although the council does so in some circumstances.
“Occasionally we do go on to back roads in exceptional circumstances. Where there are critical situations, we do everything we can to deal with them. Various issues have to be taken into account. One of those is the safety of our own staff. If these roads are so critical that even our own plant can’t go on them to deal with them. Then, obviously, that’s a difficulty in itself and we have encountered that in a few situations. But we do go off the main roads. We do make exceptions in particular situations but they are usually critical enough situations,” he said.
However, footpaths are not treated even though some have been posing problems for pedestrians in Ennis, Kilrush and Shannon, along with several villages throughout Clare.
“The priority has to be with keeping the main route network functioning so that the whole system can stay alive and up and running,” Mr Tiernan replied when asked why footpaths were not gritted. “By doing that, you’re basically accommodating a very large percentage of the overall traffic activity in the county by treating a much smaller percentage of the road length,” he explained.