Sandwell Council's gritting crews are ready and waiting for winter weather
Sandwell Council’s gritting lorries are ready to combat plunging temperatures and snow covered roads.
The council’s gritting crews have been on stand by since last week and will be on the road until April should temperatures fall close to zero or below.
Last year, the team completed 38 gritting runs using around 1,445 tonnes of salt covering around 9880 miles which is the equivalent of the distance from Sandwell to Australia. Overall with the replenishment of grit bins and footway treatments around 1,800 tonnes was used in total.
We are ready for whatever the winter brings us as there is now 6,000 tonnes of salt available to start the season with.
Every time the gritters go out, they cover around 260 miles of Sandwell's roads, each time putting down around 55 tonnes of salt.
Sandwell Council's cabinet member for environment services, Councillor Zahoor Ahmed, said: "Our gritting crew do a fantastic by keeping our streets open, moving and safe. I would like to thank the crews for their work, which often is unnoticed as it takes place primarily at night."
Sandwell Council have christened all the gritting trucks with local or winter based names and residents have been urged to wave at crews as they go by.
The trucks are called: Ice One, Cyrille, Dame Julie Salters, The Greatest Snow Van, Spread Zeppelin, Frozie Lawrence, Frosty the Snow Van, Melt-on John, Rule Gritannia and Ctrl+Salt+Delete.
