A look inside the Lincolnshire road gritting operation ahead of the winter battle to keep our roads safe
When does winter begin? The first Christmas song on the radio? Presents in the shops? Or is it that first frost?
Since we’re British and obsessed with the weather, it’s probably the last one, right?
Frosty nights mean another seasonal tradition - with gritting teams on standby to try to keep our roads safe.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Lincolnshire gritter blessing - with the honour falling to the Rt Rev Dr Nigel Peyton, Assistant Bishop for the Diocese of Lincoln.
After meeting some of the crew behind the winter-long task of keeping us all moving, Assistant Bishop Peyton blessed the gritters, staff and even the salt due to be used.
He said: “The reason why we do this is, quite simply, to help people be aware of the upcoming weather and to remind them of how we need to keep ourselves safe, take care when driving and be courteous to others on the roads.
“Our message is to be very careful, to think of other road users and for everyone to look after themselves.
“I really appreciate the people who organise and maintain these machines, those who drive them and the whole team working behind the scenes too. The gritter drivers sometimes have to drive these lorries at very unsociable hours in order to keep us safe and I would think that, especially in bad weather conditions, that this is a very skilled job indeed.
“We should all be grateful of the work these teams do. I think that, during the pandemic, we all learned to value people who we sometimes forgot about doing these sorts of jobs. These jobs that, perhaps we don’t see very often.”
Darrell Redford, Network Resilience Manager for Lincolnshire County Council, added: “By doing this we’re also focusing minds and thoughts on the naturally worsening road conditions as the worst of the winter weather begins to bite. What we do with our gritting programme is important for road users, but a large part of road safety also relies on everyone on the roads to drive accordingly, be safe and show appreciation to other road users.”
It’s all in the domain
Darrell Redford said it’s not a case of taking a best guess at where the salt is going to be needed when temperatures plummet - there’s a science to it.
“We have 12 weather stations in Lincolnshire, and access to another eight outside of the county that aren’t ours, but we share them with other areas to help us predict what weather fronts are moving across the area.
“There are two stations in each domain, which are: the Wolds, the Coast, Grantham and Grantham Ridge, Lincoln Ridge and the Fens.”
Whilst some might think Lincolnshire is flat and consistent in temperature, the reality is ground level values can vary wildly.
“We see temperatures in the Wolds drop dramatically. They can go down a lot,” adds Redford: “And across the Fens it tends to remain quite high.”
This exact level of critical live information means the gritting team can be exact about when, and where, they put the salt down.
Redford continued: “We have something called route-based forecasting where each route has its own forecast, based on the specific domains. This means that we can send out the appropriate gritters for the appropriate areas as needed. That alone saves us a lot of money and resources.
“It’s very important that we know which areas are at which temperatures too. When the road temperature is down to -2C we spread 7g of salt per square metre, between -2C and -5C we salt at 12g, at -5C to -10C that figure goes up to 17g of spread and when snow is on the road, or the temperature is lower than -10C then we go to the maximum 20g per square metre. Knowing exactly where, when and how much salt to spread anywhere in the county is an exact science and it saves us a lot of cash.”
With a pinch of…
There are two types of salt used.
The first is white (it looks like the salt you may use on your food) and needs to be treated with a brine wash as it gets spread.
Darrell Redford said: “Any salt that you use has to be treated so that it’s more sticky. One of the biggest problems that we face is loss of salt once it’s been spread. Things like wind, rain, traffic and a host of other factors can all have a big effect on how much salt stays in contact with the road surface.
“To mitigate for this, the salt is treated. Previously this would be done by mixing brine from the onboard tanks with the salt as it was spread. This added to the cost and wasn’t the most reliable of systems because if there was a blockage, or some other issue with the brine tank, then the solution couldn’t be used.
“So we, like around 40% of the country now, switched to a more reddish salt that is treated with molasses. The molasses comes to us as a by-product from sugar beet production and gets directly applied to the salt so there’s no need for brine or a brine-delivery system. The lorries can carry more, it’s cheaper all round and the molasses-treated salt sticks to the road very well.”
Highs and Lows
Twenty two years of working with our gritters means Darrell Redford understands weather patterns across the county’s winter.
“The worst I’ve ever experienced in Lincolnshire was -22.5C which we saw at Newton on Trent during the 2010/11 ‘Beast from the East’ event. The county froze solid. I’ve never seen it as bad as that in all the years I’ve been doing this job.
“On the other end of the scale, this year so far has been the mildest we’ve seen. Before this year the mildest winter – and latest start to the gritting – was last year in 2021 when we first spread on November 16. We’ve gone past that date for this year, and it’s remained mild for some time.
“Last year we went out salting on Christmas Eve but then we didn’t need to go out again until January 13. That was a long time to not have to grit in a winter. But once the lower temperatures hit us last January it did come back with a vengeance and affected us quite hard, we were then going out regularly until late February.”
Lincolnshire gritting stats
*There are 47 gritters serving the county
*LCC holds 29,200 tonnes of salt in stores this year
*On average, LCC uses 20,000 tonnes of salt a year. The gritting team used less last winter due to mild weather
*The most salt ever used in one winter was in 2010/11’s ‘Beast from the East’ - with 38,000 tonnes deployed
*Our county has 12 weather stations feeding data back about weather and road temperatures. LCC has access to eight in other counties to help make more accurate predictions
*The county has a £1.2m annual salt budget. Last year the council spent £900,000.
*Molasses-treated salt should last for five years but is always used up before this