Gritting the county's roads

The Council carries out precautionary salting on some road when temperatures are predicted to fall near freezing point. We salt the roads either at 6am or 6pm, so that we miss peak traffic times.

We prioritise these types of roads:

• Main classified routes (A and B roads)
• Principal bus routes
• Access routes to hospitals, schools and cemeteries
• Access to police, fire, ambulance and rescue services
• Primary routes serving substantial villages/communities
• Main industrial routes that are important to the local economy
• Main access routes to shopping areas
• Areas where known problems exist, such as exposed areas, steep gradients and other roads liable to icing.

The salt has to be crushed by traffic to make it effective.

Unfortunately, there are some occasions where we cannot salt the roads before the onset of icy conditions, for example:

• When rain is followed by rapidly clearing skies, salting is normally deferred until the rain stops to prevent it being washed off.
• Dawn frost occurs on dry roads. When early morning dew falls on a cold road and freezes on impact. It is impossible to forecast with any accuracy when this will occur.
• Rush hour snowfall. When rain turns to snow coinciding with rush hour traffic, early salting cannot take place as it would wash off, and gritters cannot make progress because of traffic congestion.

Here is Councillor Barry Mellor, Lead Member for the Environment and Transport talking about gritting in Denbighshire.

Cyclic works completed on A525

As part of a new initiative, the highways team recently carried out much needed drainage on the A525 all the way from Denbigh to Ruthin. 

The work involved highway drainage maintenance, verges sided, ditches excavated, and the highway swept. In recent years vegetation had grown into the channels and was covering a number of drainage outlets which were creating standing water and were a potential hazard. In the 10 days that the work took, all of these issues were addressed, and the plan now is to evaluate the cost and effectiveness to see if this initiative can be rolled out to other locations in the county.

Photos before the work took place

 

Photos during the work taking place

 

Photos after the work had been completed

 

A rake machine has been purchased to help keep Rhyl beach clean

Project to reduce the carbon output of street lights

A project has been completed to reduce the carbon output of county street lights.

The Council has finished an energy reduction project to convert all its street lights to lower wattage LED’s.

The Council maintains a total of 11,690 street lights and following some small initial trial programmes, it was decided to replace the remaining units with low energy LED lights over a 7-year project in order to achieve savings in both carbon output and electricity costs.

 

The Council’s own in house street lighting team have delivered the project in its entirety from procurement and design to installation.

The project has reduced carbon output from street lights over the seven-year period from 1,800 tonnes annually during 2015/16 to 400 tonnes for 2021/22.

Councillor Barry Mellor, Lead Member for Environment and Transport, said: “We declared a Climate and Ecological Emergency in July 2019 and developed plans to become a net carbon zero and ecologically positive council by 2030.

“I am pleased to see the conclusion of this project which is supporting our priority in tackling carbon reduction across the county.

“This lighting equipment installed has utilised the most up to date technology and energy efficient equipment including part night dimming and constant lumen output. The completed project has achieved significant reductions in electricity consumption, carbon output and energy bills.”