WAUSAU, Wis. (WSAU) -- Changing from summer work to winter work at your county highway department takes planning, and a little luck from Mother Nature. The Marathon County Highway Department like most didn’t get much of that luck this year, as winter arrived a little early.
Operations Supervisor Dan Raczkowski says some of the trucks used for plowing and salting were being used for hauling asphalt as little as three weeks ago. He says converting these trucks for winter duty is not as simple as putting a plow on a pickup. Raczkowski says each truck takes about a day and a half to change equipment. “There’s several, half a dozen of them, and those are the ones that typically get ‘harnessed up’ as we call it at the very end. That means taking the tag axles off of the trucks and replacing them with an underbody scraper, putting the wings on the trucks. The salters themselves get hung on the trucks, and then the guys check to make sure their plows and everything is working on them, and then we’re pretty much set to go.”
The Marathon County Highway Department is still recovering from a June fire that destroyed the Stratford shop and several trucks and pieces of equipment inside. Raczkowski says they’re a little short on trucks for now. “A couple of them have been replaced. We’re still working on the rest of them. We’ve got a great set of mechanics here at the highway department, and we do a lot of the fabrication work ourselves, but it’s looking by January 1st, we should have all five back online, so we’re running a little shorthanded. We’ve got enough trucks to fill our sections. We’re just short a couple of spares.”
Last winter took a lot of salt, and Raczkowski has to plan for salt use well in advance. He says Marathon County places it’s order through the state, so they can get the same low bid price. “I use a ten-year historical average for the quantities of salt that we need to order. That gets put out to bid by the D-O-T as one big unit delivered to different counties across the state, and delivery of that typically starts around mid August, end of August.”
The county has five salt sheds. Raczkowski says they are filling the 6,000 ton Wausau shed now, and the others are already filled.
Winter arrived a little earlier than expected. Raczkowski says they cut it pretty close getting the plow equipment on the trucks, and there were a couple of construction projects that didn’t get done before the weather changed. “We were pretty close to having everything done. There’s a little bit of paving that we were still looking at doing out on the western end of the county. Not a big job, but it’s something that’s going to have to wait until spring by the looks of things.”