State to help Grant County clear roads
Grant County Sheriff’s Office/Facebook photo Snowdrifts loom on either side of a Chevy Tahoe making its way down a Grant County road west of Ephrata Thursday.
MOSES LAKE — Grant County is getting some help from the state Department of Transportation to clear some of its roads following last weekend’s snow storm.
According to Wayne Rice, a maintenance supervisor with DOT in Okanogan, the state is giving one blower and an operator to assist Grant County in clearing roads north of Hartline and around Ephrata.
“We’re going to take our best stab at it,” Rice said.
Grant County’s busy road crews need a little state aid because the biggest problem they’ve been facing this week has been blowing snow, according to County Public Works Director Jeff Tincher.
“This is not a typical year,” Tincher said. “Drifting snow has been the problem, we’re busy removing snow and keeping the roads open, and we have drifting countywide.”
The worst conditions, however, have been north of Hartline and on some of the county-maintained roads north and south of Ephrata, Tincher said.
Grant County has over 2,500 miles of roads it is responsible for clearing during the winter, and around 70 employees and 30 trucks to plow, salt, and sand the roads — keeping them passable for traffic during the wintertime.
However, this week, the combination of snow and wind has forced the county to bring out some of its construction equipment — road graders and loaders — to keep the roads open.
“We even put a V-plow on one of our front loaders,” Tincher said.
Tichner didn’t know what keeping the roads open had cost so far, but he said the county has staggered its road crews across its three road districts and they have been working longer hours.
“The crews start earlier, and they work late,” he said.
According to Rice, the state has had its own issues keeping roads clear, having closed a short section of Highway 2 briefly earlier in the week. The blower the state is bringing in to Grant County is coming from one the mountain passes the state opens at the beginning of the spring.
“From the standpoint of moving blowers out the passes, it’s been almost 20 years since we’ve done this. It’s not very common,” Rice said.
Rice said the state crew will spend Friday in Hartline helping to blow open about 15 miles of road, and then a couple of days after that around Ephrata.