Deluge Of Rain Taxes Road Commission’s Resources

A press release from Craig Bryson of the Road Commission for Oakland County:

The tremendous amount of rain that has fallen this spring in Southeast Michigan is damaging roads, causing unanticipated delays for drivers and challenging the already stretched resources of the Road Commission for Oakland County (RCOC).

Local media have reported that spring 2011 is now officially one of the top-five wettest springs on record for the region and the wettest spring seen since 1956.

“All the rain is very detrimental to the road system,” noted RCOC Deputy Managing Director and County Highway Engineer Dennis Kolar. “Additionally, it requires us to spend a lot of staff time addressing water-related problems, which means we’re not able to devote those resources to our usual road maintenance activities.”

In additional to the more obvious rain-related problems – such as flooded roads and roads closed due to sinkholes – the rain is causing significant problems for gravel shoulders and gravel roads. “Just as the ground becomes unstable in the early spring when the frost is coming out, we’re seeing unstable soil now because the ground is saturated everywhere,” Kolar said.

He explained this makes gravel shoulders and gravel roads “soft,” which means traffic causes ruts and other problems. On the gravel shoulders, delivery trucks, postal vehicles and other traffic can much more easily cause damage.

As a result, RCOC is spending much more time than usual repairing gravel shoulders, re-grading gravel roads and trying to puncture the gravel berms that tend to trap water on gravel roads. This is in addition to the extra time RCOC must spend pumping water off of low spots in roads that tend to flood easily, cleaning out storm sewer drains and repairing sinkholes.

“All the rain creates much more debris than normal,” Kolar said. “This means storm drains clog up much more frequently than they normally would. When they clog, roads flood, so we spend a lot of time cleaning the drains and the drain grates.”

Additionally, the saturated ground makes paved roads more susceptible to cracking and pavement breakup. That’s because the road base becomes unstable, and the weight of traffic on the pavement, which ordinarily wouldn’t cause a problem, can now cause cracks to develop. The edges of paved roads with gravel shoulders also tend to break up more easily, as the shoulders wash away or become unstable.

“This is normally a very busy time of year for us anyway, because of all the road construction projects underway,” Kolar stated. “The additional rain-related work only spreads our workforce thinner.”

This is occurring against the backdrop of RCOC’s ever-shrinking workforce, caused by declining road funding in recent years. Since 2007, RCOC has reduced its work force by more than 20 percent, or 114 staff positions. That trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future, as funding continues to decline and expenses continue to rise. Today, RCOC actually has 106 fewer employees than in 1974, but a lot more pavement, signs, signals, etc. to maintain.

“We are doing a whole lot more with a whole lot less today than we did in the past,” Kolar said. “But, the reality is, with the additional burden of the rain-related problems, our staff is stretched very thin, and we simply are not able to do as much of the traditional road maintenance activities as we would like.”

In fact, the only new pavement going down currently is where federal funds are available. This year, using federal funds, RCOC is repaving less than 1 percent of the approximately 950 miles of major roads eligible for use of federal funds.