PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) - While the official start of winter is more than seven weeks away, PennDOT is already thinking snow.
Pennsylvania has seen snow and ice storms in Novembers past, and PennDOT’s Brad Rudolph said those experiences have convinced road managers to make preparations early.
“This year, our fleet in the Philadelphia region consists of 182 state snow trucks and 257 private contractor trucks,” he said. “So we might have a full callout of state trucks. And then, if we have a bigger storm, we might use our contractor trucks in the five-county region.”
Rudolph said PennDOT is responsible for keeping 11,000 miles of state highways in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties open and passable during storms.
And, he said, PennDOT has even more support in this year’s storm battles.
“We have winter municipal agreements with 93 municipalities, covering more than 3,600 snow lane miles of state highway,” Rudolph said. “So these local crews will salt and plow specified state roads within their borders.”
He said PennDOT has plenty of road salt on hand this year.
“Fortunately we had a very light winter last year,” Rudolph explained. “We only used about 17,000 tons of salt. So, we’re well stockpiled. We have about 120,000-plus tons of salt.”
In a typical year, he said, PennDOT uses anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 tons of salt.
Rudolph said road crews are in the process of checking plow blades and inspecting their computerized salt spreaders on the trucks. He said they’re also doing dry runs on their assigned routes getting ready for the first flakes to fly.