This article is from page 24 of the 2011-01-04 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 24 JPG
UNPRECEDENTED weather brings once-in-a-lifetime challenges for the small army of workers whose job it is to keeps the counties roads open in all conditionals.
While some roads around the county were blocked by snow and ice in the run up to Christmas, most other were kept open to allow the majority of Clare people to prepare for the holiday.
According to county engineer, Tom Tiernan, the run up to Christmas 2010, was the busiest that Clare County Council has ever had to deal with.
“The road workers were as busy as they have ever been in the run up to Christmas but in a very short time after Christmas Day the roads began to sort themselves out when the thaw happened and the integrity of roads returned again. Of course it went from the roads to another difficulty with the water which other people are dealing with at the moment,” said Tom.
“There was a variety of issues to be dealt with on the roads. As was the case all over the country we had to prioritise keeping the main roads around the county open and opera- tional so we had about 600 kilometres of national routes in Clare which we worked on. We also succeeded in keeping most of the regional routes open and operational other than for a few small sections for short periods of time.
“We had one severe snow storm in a region around Kilrush and that had a severe impact on an area down there around the N68. For the first time ever in the county we had to deploy a snow-plough but that worked well and within a number of hours after that snow fall the Kilrush Road was operational once again, once it got a substantial application of salt following the ploughing.”
Despite the best efforts of Clare County Council, Mr Tiernan is still conscious that some people were not able to reach towns and shops in the way they normally would in the run up to Christmas.
“There is no doubt about it, some areas of the network which were off the main road network were not in good condition through some of the cold snap and that made it difficult not just for our staff who had to spend long hours outside of their normal work time dealing with these roads but we were also conscious of the fact that this upset a significant proportion of the population of the county,” continued Tom.
“We are conscious that this effected some people who were not able to go out to do their shopping and it effected business as well as they had the disappointment of not having the benefit of the level of business that they might normally enjoy at that time of year. So there was a heavy responsibility involved in having the road network in as good a condition as possible.
“We had to prioritise keeping the main road network in a good condition as possible we also had to give a lot of attention to keeping the rest of the network in as good a condition as possible.
“We have almost 4,500 kilometres of roads in the county and it was never going to be easy to insure that the work we did was the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people but I think that we succeeded reasonably well in that.
“It is not possible to get everything right for everyone but we had a number of strategies in place and did as well as we could do.”