The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development says it hopes to have all major highways in the New Orleans metro open by the end of the day Friday. Crews working to get those roads open are getting some help from Mother Nature.
"It is melting, but it's not melting at a rate where it's going to dissipate and evaporate," DOTD District Engineer Administrator Scott Boyle said. "They're looking forward to the conclusion."
Boyle says crews have been working four to five hours a night to clear snow and ice off the area's interstates and bridges. Boyle told WWL's Tommy Tucker that it's an all-hands-on-deck operation.
"We've got a lot of snowplows that are in the area either from contractors or from other different municipalities that have been cleaning up the surface streets," Boyle said. "We've got crews from different parts of the state such as Alexandria--for DOTD, they've come in."
Boyle says the warmer temperatures are helping work crews remove ice and snow from I-10, I-55, and the Westbank Expressway, among other roads that were shut down amid the snow storm.
"We want to make the commute home wide open and try to alleviate some of that gridlock," Boyle said. "If we don't have it open, then everybody is going to be on surface streets, and that's going to be causing a problem."
Boyle said safety is the number-one priority for him and his crews.
"Once we get it to a point that we feel good and the cars start rolling on it, it's going to dissipate even more, but we don't want to put the cars rolling on it if there are remnants of black ice and some shadows that can cause a really bad accident for somebody," Boyle said.
