Hanover crews doing what they can to maintain roads as frost heaving continues

The Head of Public Works for the RM of Hanover says his crews are doing their best to keep rural roads in passable condition. 

Wes Fehr says it is a fairly normal spring as far as road conditions go. Unfortunately, this means there is some nasty frost heaving in the municipality. 

“We're seeing a lot of frost boils that are coming out in the roads in a lot of the rural areas, predominantly in that area from Mitchell to Grunthal and working our way south and east from that line, that's where we see most of the issues.” 

In many ways, Fehr says it is a waiting game. He notes it’s hard to pinpoint how deep the frost actually goes and how much moisture is down there. 

“The cause of frost boils is generally just poor subsoil conditions with the types of soils that are down there. Repairs to those kind of things are very costly because we have to actually excavate and replace all that that subsoil. The cost of doing those kinds of repairs would be very expensive and a hard thing to try and budget for.” 

Bristol Road (Road 32 E) just south of McKenzie Road (Road 35 N)

However, this doesn’t mean that nothing is being done to fix these trouble areas. Fehr says his crews are trying to maintain the worst spots with graders as best they can. 

“We have what we call profile packers that are on the back of the graders to help us with flotation because those are heavy pieces of equipment and sometimes, we make it worse than what it was prior. But having the packers on the back allows us to float over the top of a lot of that stuff and try and heal it and at least try and keep the moisture from accumulating on the top because the dryer we can get the road, the better it's going to be.” 

How long will it be before conditions improve for summer?  

Fehr says “Sometimes some warmer spring rains can help with getting that frost out of the ground and the warmer the temperatures, the faster it can come out. Generally we look at this going into mid to end of May before we really start to see things getting a whole lot better.”

Meanwhile, Ron Kowalchuk, Public Works Manager for the RM of La Broquerie, says they too are maintain trouble spots in the municipality.