How Lexington is tackling ice with more salt, heavy trucks this weekend
Lexington officials are not giving up on clearing the city’s roads after winter storm Fern covered the area in more ice than forecasters initially expected.
Turn lanes, major intersections, school bus routes and built-up ice piles will be a focus of the weekend’s winter response efforts, on top of general roadway plowing and clearance.
City street crews plan to use front-end loaders and skid steers to break up patches of ice over the weekend. Road salt and Beet Heet, a deicer derived from beets, will still be applied to local roadways.
“Even though we have spread about 3,600 tons of salt and 12,000 gallons of Beet Heet ... we still have ice,” Nancy Albright, the city’s commissioner for environmental quality and public works, said Friday afternoon.
An average winter storm requires just 1,000 to 1,500 tons of salt according to Albright.
In a Wednesday press conference, Mayor Linda Gorton said the combination of snow and ice from the winter storm was complicating the response effort.
“People just need to be patient,” Gorton said in response to questions about why some city roads are still choked by ice and snow. “They continue to make progress. We had a half foot of snow plus ice.”
Albright said Friday the winter storm had different effects across the state, which could explain why other central Kentucky counties have clearer roadways now than Lexington does. “One or two counties away from Fayette, in any direction, was a very different weather experience,” she said.
