A grueling season of storms

The last six months of weather in the Buckeye State is probably something Knox County residents would rather forget.

This past winter really got started about a month early, with a snowstorm on Thanksgiving that proved to be the harbinger of things to come. When winter finally loosened its grip on Knox County, along came the rain, with powerful storms, and destructive winds. That combination left fallen tree limbs, downed utility lines, washed out culverts, and blocked roads in its wake.

Now, just six months after Thanksgiving, it finally appears that fair weather is settling into Knox County, with warmer days ahead — not a minute too soon.

“We’ve been dealing with water and the thing with water, people associate it with flooding,” said Knox County Engineer Cameron Keaton, “What they don’t associate with it, is the fact that, once the ground gets saturated, and the leaves come out on the trees, when we have heavy rains, it will also bring down a lot of trees, as well.”

Keaton and his work crews, put in long hours, just to keep the roads safe and clear.

“We deal with the weather, for the most part,” said Keaton. “You can't control Mother Nature. She’ll do what she wants to do. So, when you’ve done this for a number of years, you just get used to it. It wears on you a little bit. The winter was cold and it was long. Our guys put in a lot of hours of overtime and it wore on them, but we made it through.”

With the end of winter, however, spring brought powerful storms with heavy rains and wind.

“The spring storms came through and the higher winds brought trees down, primarily,” said Keaton. “With the trees coming down, they’re in power lines and other things. That can be a long, drawn out process.”

Mother Nature gives little warning about what’s coming — or when.

“A lot of stuff seems to happen on weekends, in the middle of the night, when nobody’s here,” said Keaton. “Then, we’ve got our guys coming in at night and in early hours. On the weekends, a lot of times, we'll just cut a tree up to get it off the road, just to make sure it's passable. Then, we may have to come back the following week, and do a lot of cleanup work. That might mean, cutting it further back from the roadway, chipping up limbs, or whatever that may be.”

This recent Thanksgiving to Memorial Day stretch may be the worst winter/spring combination of weather in recent memory.

“In 10 years as a county engineer, this is the first time I remember that it has been that active,” said Keaton. “This year with the wind and the rain, we got all of it. We might deal with one or the other most years, but we've gotten all three (wind, rain, and snow) this year.”

Road crews were not just plowing roads and clearing fallen trees. They were saving infrastructure.

“We had some pipes wash out,” Keaton explained, “Typically, some of the culvert pipes get overwhelmed by the flow of water. The flow becomes more than the pipes can handle. Sometimes, the water starts flowing around the pipe and then, it may wash out a roadway. So we have some pipes that need to be replaced, due to some of the heavy rain in the spring.”

There is simply no way to predict what Mother Nature is going unleash, at any given time.

“It kind of varies," said Keaton. “The northern part of the county might see two or three inches of rain, while the southern part might only get a trace of rain. It depends on how the storms move across the county and how much rain comes down. A steady rain usually doesn’t cause as much of a problem, as those deluges that we get. When it comes through and dumps three or four inches in a short period of time. Those are the ones that cause us the most problems, when it comes down hard and fast. Sometimes, it washes the berming away from the edge of the roadway. Sometimes, you’ll be driving down the road and you might see the drop off that’s maybe 12 inches down, off the edge of the roadway, where the berming is all washed out. So, there’s a lot of clean up after these storms. We spend a lot of time, trying to get those things cleaned up. Unfortunately, it takes time away from us, maybe patching roads other things that we should normally be doing at this time of the year.”

It’s difficult to measure the severity of the last, six months in dollars and cents. Keaton simply has to manage the resources at his disposal, and pray for better weather.

“You know, it would be overtime,” said Keaton. “I don't know that we really track the cost of the individual storms, just because nothing’s declared an emergency by the governor, and that we're not going to get reimbursed for it. It’s just what we have to do and we have to pay that out of our funds that we have available to us. When you get those big (snow) storms that cover the entire county, we're required to split crews in half, if we’re plowing for long, extended periods of time. If I have 26 guys in the garage and we’re plowing around the clock, we typically have to divide them into two 13-man crews. So, we just can’t cover as much area in the same amount of time.”

Perhaps now, with the advent of milder weather, Keaton and the Knox County Highway Department can finally get back to business as usual.

“We cleaned up quite a bit from all of the stuff that we dealt with, from the snow, the winds, and the rain,” Keaton said. “We’re still working on a couple of pipes and getting them replaced. Then, our crews are primarily going to be focusing on patching and paving activities across the county.”

Keeping Knox County roads safe, especially in bad weather is a very important part of what (the Highway Department does, but there is only so much, anyone can do. Area drivers need to do their part, by using good judgment. Avoid driving through flooded roadways, at any time.

“The big word that people hear all the time is, ‘You don’t know what is going on beneath that water, when we have big rainstorms like that, roadways are flooded,'” said Keaton. “We encourage people, (telling them) do not drive through (water), because there could be a wide open hole underneath there, somewhere. People don’t always think about that, but it doesn’t take long for a pipe to wash out.”