The winter storm last Sunday night and Monday, followed by a bone-chilling arctic blast of cold air, has had county road crews working 24/7 for the past week.
Stanley Hall, Cumberland County road superintendent, said the snow, temperature drop, slight warm up and then dropping to zero or below caused a perfect storm of icy road conditions.
“We’ve been out working on the roads as much as we can for the past week. We’ve been helping the sheriff’s department and ambulance service with clearing wrecks. We’ve been plowing and salting as much as possible,” Hall said. “We have to help clear those wrecks as quickly as possible.”
Additional freezing rain and a dusting of snow on top of that during the later part of the week made conditions even worse.
“There’s no catching up with it at this point until we have a thaw,” he said.
Hall said the county has five salt trucks with plows. There are also two graders, but those can’t be used on top of icy roads until there is some thawing.
“Those graders will slide straight off into the ditch,” he said.
Hall said that the usual plan is to hit the main roads first and bad areas with the plows and a salt-and-sand mixture for traction. Then the crew goes to secondary roads to work on clearing those.
“We haven’t had much of chance to even get to the secondary roads much with having to deal with all of the wrecks and with the hills and curves. We have salt, but the county couldn’t afford to have enough salt to cover all of the roads in the county. There’s more than a thousand miles of roads,” Hall said.
There are several counties in Middle and East Tennessee in the same situation.
“I’ve talked to Morgan County and Roane County and Bledsoe highway departments, and they’re all in the same conditions with solid ice,” Hall said.
Loudon and Knox counties are also covered in ice, according to several social media posts.
Hall cautioned residents to be careful once the roads do start to thaw.
“When they thaw during the day, the water will flow across them from melting and will refreeze at night,” Hall said.
The additional problem has been more than one week of sub-freezing temperatures, preventing ice from thawing on county backroads.
“We will continue to clear the roads as best as we can. The thawing and warming temperatures will help,” he said.
In the meantime, Hall said it would be best to stay off the backroads if possible.
Crossville Meteorologist Mark Baldwin said temperatures this week should be gradually climbing up toward 60 degrees by the end of the week with lows in the 40s. Beginning Tuesday there will be chances of rain showers each day.