State highway officials said Tuesday that they will add personnel and equipment to improve the Highway Department’s response to winter storms, but they doubted that even that would have prevented long delays on icy northeast Arkansas highways last week given the magnitude of that storm and its subfreezing temperatures.
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“The things the department could do better and will do better wouldn’t have substantially changed the outcome,” state Highway and Transportation Department Director Scott Bennett said Tuesday afternoon after a meeting of the House and Senate transportation committees.
Bennett told lawmakers that years of keeping personnel and maintenance costs at a minimum backfired on the department in a big way last week.
In light of that storm and its aftermath, “A lot of the things we’ve done in the name of efficiencies have become glaring deficiencies,” he said.
Still, Bennett said, the department will make improvements, including purchasing better equipment that initially can be used anywhere in the state to respond to storms. He said it will also engage in more effective communication, cross-train employees in heavy-equipment operation so that more can be deployed during bad weather, devote more attention to secondary routes and develop a protocol so that quicker decisions can be made about closing major thoroughfares.
Bennett and Col. Stan Witt, the commander of the Arkansas State Police, spent more than 90 minutes before the legislators Tuesday. The meeting was convened to “review what happened, what we did right and where we have opportunities to do better,” said state Sen. Keith Ingram, D-West Memphis.
Bennett also spent a couple of hours meeting Tuesday afternoon with the Arkansas Highway Commission.
The Highway Department, the state police and other agencies struggled to deal with rapidly deteriorating weather conditions that ground traffic to a halt on Interstates 40 and 55 in east Arkansas on March 2 and the days that followed. The long delays prompted Gov. Mike Beebe and others to criticize the department’s “unacceptable” response.
The storm hit roughly the northern half of the state and kept temperatures below freezing for three days. It dropped up to 6 inches of sleet in Mississippi County. The storm was part of a larger system that wreaked havoc across the nation, canceling thousands of airline flights and causing backups on major thoroughfares in other states.
The storm’s precipitation “was a lot greater than forecast,” Bennett said.
“We were in reaction mode,” said Witt, whose agency worked 31 accidents on I-40 and 11 accidents on I-55 during the storm and the cold days after.
None of the crashes resulted in injuries or fatalities, although one woman suffered a heart attack after she tried to jump on the bumpers of two vehicles that were stuck together, he said.
Tuesday’s committee meeting was a relatively calm affair with few displays of emotion, although Rep. Marshall Wright, D-Forrest City, provided an exception.
“Why did everybody in east Arkansas know how bad I-40 was, and your department didn’t?” he asked at one point.
Bennett and Witt indicated that in addition to the weather, there were other problems that the department was handling March 2. They pointed to a traffic crash that afternoon on an I-40 frontage road that tied up traffic and personnel. A vehicle had hit a power pole, causing power lines to fall across the interstate. Traffic was stopped for two hours to allow power company crews to repair that line, they said.
Beebe and lawmakers also referred to reports and photographs provided by motorists that compared the conditions of Arkansas’ post-storm roads with those in Missouri. Several photos online showed that road conditions improved greatly the moment drivers crossed from Arkansas into Missouri.
But Bennett said his counterparts in Missouri are better-funded and equipped to handle snow and ice, which until this year has been relatively infrequent in Arkansas.
He focused, as an illustration, on the availability of “belly plows,” which fit under specially designed dump trucks that use the weight of the truck to scrape snow and ice from roadways. Those plows are in addition to front end plows.
Arkansas Highway Department trucks can be outfitted only with front-end plows, which are less-effective in clearing roadways. Belly-plow trucks typically cost about $170,000 versus $120,000 for the regular dump trucks. Both types can be used for maintenance work at other times of the year.
Bennett said his department has six belly-plow trucks for all of Arkansas. Missouri highway officials used eight belly-plow trucks on a 30-milesection of I-55 north from the Arkansas border. That amount of equipment allowed Missouri to plow a given location every six minutes, and even then it took 31 hours to clear that portion of I-55, Bennett said.
Missouri has 570 belly-plow trucks assigned to the two highway districts encompassing 46 counties that border Arkansas, which has only 362 conventional plows for the state’s 75 counties, Bennett said.
In Mississippi County, which took the brunt of last week’s storm, Bennett said his agency has eight trucks, which allowed it to plow a given location once every 125 minutes - more than two hours.
The department delayed sending reinforcements to northeast Arkansas because much of the rest of the state was coated with varying amounts of ice. Initially, crews had to stay in those districts to handle problems caused by overnight refreezing. The department eventually sent three crews from other areas of the state to help near Forrest City, West Memphis and Osceola, Bennett said.
The Missouri highway department has a budget of $2.8 billion and 5,100 employees, while the Arkansas department has a $1 billion budget and 3,600 employees. Missouri also supplements its highway workforce with seasonal employees in the winter, while Arkansas has seasonal employees only during the summer, Bennett said.
In addition, Arkansas has two voter-approved construction programs that earmark money for specific projects. One is the $1 billion interstate repair program and the other is the $1.8 billion program to extend and widen four-lane highways. None of that money can be spent on general highway maintenance or personnel,commission member Robert Moore Jr. of Arkansas City said at the commission meeting.
The department has been working on a formal winter-storms policy handbook as a result of meeting with Missouri officials in December after its snowstorm response then prompted criticism. Bennett said the department expects to have it ready by April.
The department also plans to acquire 12 more belly-plow trucks with its existing budget, but Bennett said updating its aging equipment will require the commission to make some tough choices. Equipment upgrades could cost the department more than $20 million, he said. To replace the 400 employees that the department has shaved from its staff over the past 20 years could cost $10 million, Bennett said.
To get on par with Missouri could cost $400 million, he said.
“Are we going to take money away from construction and put it it into maintenance?” Bennett asked at the commission meeting. “Part of it’s going to be what you will be willing to do.”
Chairman John Ed Regenold of Armorel said he wanted to see a list of specific staff recommendations before the commission makes any decisions.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 03/12/2014