Riverhead gets enough road salt today to ‘make it through another night’

Motorists take heart. Riverhead Town took delivery of 80 tons of road salt this afternoon.

“That means I make it through another night,” Deputy Highway Superintendent Mark Gajowski said after the delivery.

It’s a relief, though it may be short-lived.

“This will allow us to do the town roads one more time and then spot-sand again in the morning,” Gajowski said.

The above-freezing temperatures melt some of the snowpack, but leave roads wet and sometimes even with standing water. Then when temperatures drop at night, the water freezes. Temperatures are forecast to dip to 10 degrees tonight, with overnight lows in the 20s forecast through Monday night. They will drop only to the lower 30s from mid-week next week, when daytime highs will reach the low- to mid-40s, according to the National Weather Service.

Since the spate of snowy weather began at the end of January, road salt has been arriving one or two loads at a time, he said. The salt supplier in Staten Island, Atlantic Salt Company, doesn’t give the towns advance notice of deliveries, he said.

“What comes, comes,” Gajowski said. “Something is better than nothing.”

Road salt needs traffic or the heat of the sun to make it work most effectively, he said. That’s what melts the salt, which in turn melts the snow and ice.

Riverhead, like other towns, mixes salt with sand to stretch the supply. They’ve been using higher proportions of sand to salt. The more sand and the less salt in the mix, the less melting power the mix has.

County and state public works departments always seem to have a more abundant supply of salt than the towns, Gajowski said. They seem to be able to use straight salt on county- and state-maintained roads, he said. The result: black pavement.

“It’s frustrating,” Gajowski said. “People ask us why the county roads are clear and ours aren’t.”

Another problem that vexes town highway crews that county or state crews generally don’t have to deal with are parked cars. Town-maintained roads are more often residential streets — and people are not complying with town directives to remove parked cars from the streets during snowstorms.

Parking on town roads has been a point of contention between Highway Superintendent George Woodson and members of the town board. The board agreed to amend town code to require a parking ban on town roads whenever the supervisor declares a snow emergency. Woodson got their agreement with his promise to plow private roads whenever a snow emergency is declared. Last year, he notified homeowners living on private roads the town would no longer plow private roads, which touched off an outcry of protest. The dispute was settled with the agreement to plow private roads when a snow emergency is declared — and a code amendment to put the parking ban in place.

Woodson has called on the town police department to step up enforcement of the parking ban. He says police have not issued tickets or towed any vehicles.

Police Chief David Hegermiller said last month officers had not issued any parking tickets because the highway superintendent had not called police to inform him that there were any parked cars “impeding plowing.”

Woodson said yesterday he didn’t understand why that would be necessary — “It’s pretty obvious,” he said — but he then began letting police know where cars are parked on the street.

“It didn’t seem to do any good,” he said.

The police chief could not be reached for comment this afternoon.

The snow emergency declarations should be issued in advance of a significant storm, Woodson said. Instead, it’s issued after the snow’s been falling for a while, sometimes even after there’s plowable snow.

The snow emergency declaration issued yesterday banned parking from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., but the declaration by its terms expired at 8 p.m.

“What good did that do?” Woodson asked with a laugh. It mandated highway trucks to plow private roads — something they’d been doing for decades anyway. Woodson admits he was hoping his stance on private roads would spur the town board to act on the snow emergency parking ban.

“Parked cars make our jobs 10 times harder,” Woodson said.

“I really just don’t see what the big deal is.”