RSSMild days allow roadwork head start
Trevor Allen, left, of Grand Junction pulls on a delineator post as Joe McQuiston, also of Grand Junction, uses a level to determine if the post is straight on Friday. The two men, members of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s Patrol 2, were working on the posts along the westbound lanes of U.S. Highway 50 west of 32 Road.
It’s wintertime, and the highway maintenance was easy.
Winter, though, is blustering back into western Colorado today after setting a record for warmth, putting a damper on the early run of roadway spring cleaning.
The mercury in Grand Junction rose Friday to 57 degrees, a degree warmer than the previous record, 56 degrees in 1981, National Weather Service meteorologist Matthew Aleksa said.
High-country roads are likely to be demanding attention today with southern, central and northern mountains due to see 6 to 16 inches of snow as clouds move in from the southwest.
Mild daytime temperatures likely will continue through the weekend, in the high 40s and low 50s with rain in the valleys, Aleksa said.
The run of warm days put the average high daily temperature at 43.3 degrees to date in January, 6.7 degrees higher than normal, and Colorado Department of Transportation workers took advantage of the unseasonable warmth and dryness.
Maintenance crews tackled a variety of tasks, including pothole filling and roadway patching; repairing and reinforcing shoulders; fixing and cleaning fences, signs and roadside delineators; clearing ditches and culverts; sweeping highways and bridges; picking up trash, and more.
Crews took advantage of the warmth to install some fake cattle guards on Colorado Highway 141 south of Whitewater, spokeswoman Nancy Shanks said, noting, “We usually wouldn’t get to that until it gets warmer.”
Fake cattle guards work, by the way, because cattle see the dark lines as deeper than the light ones, fooling the cattle into reacting as though they can’t cross over.
Pleasant as the days have been, it’s still January, and crews also were out on Colorado Highway 340, chipping away at stubborn patches of ice, Shanks said.
Warm winter days are a “great time to clear debris around bridge piers,” especially minor work that requires no environmental clearances, John David, deputy maintenance superintendent for the Grand Junction section of the department, said in a statement.
The Grand Junction section isn’t alone. Some crews in the southwest portion of the state “have been catching up on years’ worth of things” that never quite amounted to requiring immediate action, Shanks said
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