When winter weather arrives, area road crews will be ready to salt, brine and plow their way through snow and ice.

“Winter preparation for us is almost a year-round thing,” Kentucky Transportation Cabinet District 3 spokesman Wes Watt said. “After each winter we have to take stock in our supplies. We have to take stock in our equipment and we also have to make repairs or replacement to that stock and equipment. Then by Nov. 1 we need to have our salt supplies, our calcium chloride, our brine and our drivers trained and ready to go.

“So a few months prior to that we get all that scheduled and make sure all that is completed. So in case we get an early winter we’ll be ready to go right out of the gate. Snow and ice a season is something we take extremely seriously and it’s one of our No. 1 tasks in keeping with public safety.”

After last winter’s heavy snows, transportation officials consulted with multiple national, state and local level weather forecasters to try to determine needs for this winter.

“It seems like the general consensus is there’s not a consensus.” Watt said. “This area of the United States is kind of in the middle of an area that’s a coin flip. It could be a bad winter, it could be a mild winter. Nobody could give us a straight answer. But the bottom line is, we are prepared for the worst and we are hoping for the best.”

With 10 counties in District 3, the state has a combined total of 19,918 tons of salt, 97,188 gallons of liquid calcium chloride and 99,400 gallons of brine to use on roads this winter.

The state has already conducted snow and ice training for its truck drivers and contract drivers and inspected all of the trucks and the snow and ice removal equipment, engineering tech Stacey Beason said. The salters have been calibrated so that when the trucks are spreading salt, they spread enough to be effective but not too much to avoid waste.

“It’s very important,” Beason said of calibration. “You can put out too little amount of salt and you might not put out the right amount of salt to help melt the snow and ice.”

Brine is a liquid salt used to prevent ice from bonding to the road surface.

“When it does snow, we can drop our plows and blade it right off,” Beason said. “That’s a proactive approach to the upcoming winter storm.”

Calcium chloride works with the salt to help melt ice when the temperatures drop to below 25 degrees, Beason said.

The salt domes and brine and calcium chloride tanks in all of District 3’s 10 counties – Allen, Barren, Butler, Edmonson, Logan, Metcalfe, Monroe, Simpson, Todd and Warren – are filled to capacity and will stay filled throughout the winter, Watt said.

“We want to be at maximum capacity prior to winter starting,” he said. “We reorder everything as we use it to stay at maximum capacity as much as we can. We don’t want to risk being low on salt or calcium chloride and then having our supplier not be able to supply us with what we need. So we restock after every winter storm.

“It’s better to be prepared and not need it then not be prepared and need it.”

Roads are cleared based on a priority established by traffic volumes.

“We have to focus on the A routes first, which consists of Interstate 65, the Natcher and Cumberland parkways and most U.S. routes. The challenge for us when we get extremely heavy snows is sometimes we have to divert most of our resources to Interstate 65. The interstate is the top priority. During these heavy snows it’s a challenge for us to keep up with keeping that clear so sometimes the other A routes aren’t able to be treated. So we ask folks to please be patient during really heavy snowstorms because it can be a while before we can get to more rural roads,” Watt said.

When a winter storm starts out as a heavy rain prior to turning to snow or ice, the roads can’t be brined first, which causes more difficulty in clearing them. The state is asking drivers to check road conditions before heading out in winter weather. Drivers can visit http://snowky.ky.gov online to learn about road conditions. For information on roads in District 3, drivers can check the District 3 Twitter account at @kytcdistrict3 or on Facebook.

“It’s better to be stuck inside your house then it is to be stuck on the side of the road,” Watt said. “It’s a safety issue for folks to be stuck out on the roadways and a secondary issue is that stranded vehicles block the roadway and our plows cannot get through to plow the road. That’s been a major issue the last couple of years with these heavy snows.”

Warren County Road Superintendent Jerry Young had crews working on county road trucks last week in preparation for winter. The snow plows and salt spreaders are ready.

The county has purchased 1,500 tons of salt and is ready to tackle winter weather on the 750 miles of roads in Warren County, Young said. Last winter, the county used 1,200 tons of salt. In addition to the 1,500 tons of salt already in the salt domes, the county has another 500 tons on standby with the supplier in case more is needed.

“I think everything is in pretty good shape,” Young said. “We’ll go over our blades on our snow plows. There’s always something to do to them.

“I’d say we’re pretty much ready,” he said.

— Follow Assistant City Editor Deborah Highland on Twitter @BGDNCrimebeat or visit bgdailynews.com.