As the weather across Lincolnshire continues to remain typically British with periods of rain, sunshine and icy conditions the county council say they’ve been working hard with their team of gritters to make sure that motorists don’t get caught out by the bad weather.
The RAC have issued tips to help motorists deal with the winter weather including:
- Make sure you have enough tread left
Motorists in Lincoln Photo: Andrew Norris on your tires, although the legal minimum is 1.6mm of tread depth it is recommended you have at least 3mm to help your car maintain traction.
- Check your windscreen wipers because they can become frozen to your windscreen in bad conditions and using them when they are stuck can wear out the motor.
- Make sure all of your lights work as its important that other drivers can see you when conditions get bad.
- Cold weather and batteries don’t mix well so make sure to get your battery tested by a mechanic to make sure it won’t fail when the temperature drops.
- And make sure to top up your screen wash with a mix that wont freeze in the cold weather.
LSJ News spoke to Darrell Redford, Network Resilience Manager at Lincolnshire County Council said the council is working hard to make sure the major roads across the county are safe for drivers.
“We do all A and B roads so we’re looking at roads that that take the majority of the traffic of Lincolnshire we also look at doing any road within 500 metres of every school and we put every hospital on the network and every blue light service like the fire brigade and the police and ambulance.” – Darrell Redford.
He said: ” There’s nine of us in total we run a 24 hour, 7 day a week service, that’s including Christmas and New Year running three shifts a day.”
“We get a forecast everyday from a group called meteor group who look after all the data from the weather stations and give us a prediction of whats going to happen in the next 24 hours so if we get a forecast of bad weather they’ll tell us when they think it’s going to drop down to zero in certain areas and we’ll then send the gritters out four hours before that predicted drop in temperature.”
He added: “We do all A and B roads so we’re looking at roads that that take the majority of the traffic of Lincolnshire we also look at doing any road within 500 metres of every school and we put every hospital on the network and every blue light service like the fire brigade and the police and ambulance. We also look to keep one route open to all main villages in the county as well so out of the 9,000km (5600 miles) in the county we do about 3,000km (1800 miles) which is about 1/3 of the county.”