Bowling Green Public Works department getting ready for winter weather

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – As fall quickly turns into winter, the Bowling Green Public Works department is getting ready to prep the roads for winter weather.

The crews are shifting from clearing leaves to switching their trucks over so they can deploy salt at a moment’s notice, and it takes a lot of material to get the roads ready.

This year, the city has 2,000 tons of salt on hand, all of it coated in magnesium chloride. That coating helps produce a bit of heat, and creates safer driving conditions once the snow and ice start to fall.

“We take rock salt and then we pay a company to actually spray it with magnesium chloride, which is the bluish aqua color that you see behind me. And that helps us get a little bit more bang for our buck in terms of it helps heat up the road as it’s melting and actually lowers the freezing temperature of water just a little bit. So you’ll see slush instead of ice. Now, once it gets down to those bitterly cold, you know, below zero for a long extended time, we’re still fighting a losing battle but we do apply this to the roads,” said Public Works director Andy Souza.

But its not just the city that is hard at work on the roads. The city shares responsibility for roads with both the state and the county. They all have priorities as well, making sure our emergency services and school transportation services have safe routes on the road.

“State is our partner when it comes to bad weather in the states, going to hit those big roads that probably everybody can name, Scottsville Road, Nashville Road, Russellville, Glen Lilly, Campbell Lane, those are state routes and our partners at District three, we’ll get those done and then they have a priority scheme very similar to ours where it works. First responders are going to be taking care of first so we can get those first responders out on those big arterials, those big lines of communication, just like we will do. And then the secondary, what we call priority B is going to be our school routes. So A and B together our biggest lift over 400 lane miles,” Souza said.

Souza says that the salt is corrosive and that 24 hours after driving on the roads you should try to wash the salt off as it would do damage to your car. The City of Bowling Green has a map showing the different zone and priorities for their trucks.

You can click here for that map.