CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — North Carolina Department of Transportation crews are working Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, ready to respond in case the roads need to be cleared or they need to lay down more brine on the streets to keep the snow from sticking to the pavement.
DOT Division 10 pretreated the roads from Mecklenburg County and areas east, including Union, Cabarrus, Anson, and Stanly counties.
The places that usually get the snow, the mountains counties, or anything west including Gaston, Cleveland and Catawba counties, did not get pretreated because it’s expected to be fairly dry in those areas.
Crews got out in front of the storm big time pretreating the interstates and secondary roads on Monday, MLK Day.
DOT says they treat the roads as far in advance as possible, putting down brine, which is a salt, calcium, and water mix so that it will have time to bond to the pavement and create a barrier against any precipitation.
But that mixture doesn’t work as well when it gets really cold.
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“After you get to a certain temperature, it loses its effectiveness, so it’s around 18 degrees that it kind of doesn’t do what we want it to do,” said Jen Goodwin with NC DOT. “Just because the road is treated, we do have some concern about some of this falling and sticking to the roads especially you have to keep in mind bridges and elevated surfaces, you know we have those big flyover bridges too, you have air above them and beneath them so that air can kind of make things freeze over more quickly.”
On Tuesday night, DOT says they will have crews of about five or six people at each of the county maintenance yards in Cabarrus, Mecklenburg, Union, Anson, and Stanly Counties.
