To The Editor:
Well, it has now been three weeks since we had any measurable rain and we are still driving through mud and water across the road in several places.
This is on 3520 Road south of 900 Road. This is not some back road with little traffic. It is a heavy traveled road, not just the dozen or so residents but heavy oil field traffic, pumpers, trash trucks, people feeding cattle, visitors, school bus and Davenport farms, which is a kind of retreat for NAIC clients and employees.
It’s not uncommon to meet six or eight vehicles coming or going.
Don’t let anyone try to tell you the condition of this road is because of all the rain we’ve had. It is not.
This is not flood water in the road. It is swamp water.
Water goes to the lowest point it can get to, it cannot flow uphill or over a ridge to get to a lower point, so anyone can see with their own eyes the lowest point is the middle of the road.
I could see this coming back in the summer because the guy running the grader was not only not building a crown in the road when its was dry and the ditches could be cleaned out and the material used to crown the road and fill in low places, he was flattening what little crown there was.
Common sense alone should tell anyone the center of the road has to be the highest point and slope from there to both sides of the road.
Several years ago, a different grader man knocked the crown out of a stretch of road between a tinhorn and a high point. Of course, the results were water standing in the road, so traffic was making holes that just kept getting bigger and bigger.
It was obvious what was needed, but the county did nothing. So I finally took my tractor and pulled material from the ditches and built a good crown.
This stretch of road remained solid, smooth and dry until in just the last few months.
The guy grading our roads now knocked the middle of the road not just flat but lower in places than the edge, so, now, of course, when it rains it is rutted, muddy, pot holes where water stands and very rough.
I recently fixed another smaller low place with my much smaller tractor so the water would run off the road and it stayed solid and dry, but only took the grader a couple of passes to knock the crown out, so now water stands there for several days after a rain.
There are other places on this road that have fair ditches, but he doesn’t grade to the ditch so there is a ridge between where he grades to the ditch causing water to stand well out in the road.
Anywhere water stands on a road for any period of time, it softens the roadbed and traffic starts beating out holes, allowing more water to stand and softens the road even more. This just keeps getting worse and worse.
Now I don’t possess any great secret knowledge on this subject. It’s all plain common sense, except to grade a road properly you have to be able to tell if you are leaning toward the ditch on whichever side of the road you are grading.
I do know to maintain a gravel/dirt road. I was a finish blade operator in the ‘70s and I have graded county roads and haven’t forgotten a thing.
I even went so fart as to volunteer my time, for free, to fix and maintain this road and others. It would have only cost the county a little fuel.
They never got back to me and they’ve already spent much more than that by dumping two or three loads of rock in these low places, which fixed nothing.
This grader man spread the rock and left large, very deep and rough holes.
So I can only conclude the commissioner and the road foreman either have no idea how to maintain a road or they are incapable of ensuring their employees (some of them) do the job right.
P.S. Don’t let anyone tell you can’t be done with only a grader. It can. I’ve done it.
Ray Thronesbery
To The Editor:
This letter concerns condition of roads in Lincoln County.
920 E Road has water standing in deep holes in the road. No bar ditches. No weeds cut along the road.
When it rains one-half to one inch, I can’t get out.
My car is low down.
Mary Ruth Blaney