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Bend Road Crews Prepare For Winter Season

BEND, OR -- With freezing temperatures back in the daily forecast, road crews are now on-call.  Bend Transportation and Mobility Director David Abbas says everyone has transitioned from construction season to winter operations, “That’s everything from working with our mechanics in the shops, transitioning equipment over, getting sander units slid into some of our dump trucks, snowplows, there’s training for staff, we review our snow and ice control plan.”

Street crews are ready to plow when needed, but drivers can’t expect every road to be cleared at once, “We work on a prioritized system. With 880 lane miles it’s not realistic to have enough equipment to hit all of that, because that equipment and things would be sitting around for a good part of the year,” says Abbas who noted the top priorities are those busy commercial routes, the arterials, then collector streets, with local, residential roads as the lowest priority. 

Bend crews use almost every snow removal tool to keep roads clear. “We don’t use salt, really, in the area. You know, we’ve got the Deschutes River running right through town, so we don’t use salt like back east. When there’s about two inches of snow accumulated and we can start plowing, we start plowing. But up to that, it’s sanding those safety areas: corners, hills, intersections, that type of thing,” said Abbas.

Streets will also be chemically pretreated when it’s appropriate, but last week’s storm came with rain, which made pre-treating impossible. 

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