Ballard: Highway Works with O&R To Open Roads

Since Saturday’s snow storm, the Clarkstown Highway Department has been working non-stop to clear roads, trees and debris to make streets passable again.

“We identified from the first day of the storm which roads are totally closed and which people are trapped (with) no way in and no way out,” said Wayne Ballard, Highway superintendent. “We prioritized our efforts that way.”

The highway departments in the county need to work hand in hand with Orange and Rockland Utilities because they can’t clear the roads until O&R can separate the wires from the trees.

“So that’s inhibiting us,” said Ballard.

O&R has two types of crews:

Crew Type 1

• “One crew that does everything. They de-energize the wire, cut the tree up within 10 feet of the wires.  Then we (the highway department) take care of the rest. If the tree is up against the wires, their job is to take the tree away from the wires.” He added that O&R usually has a 5-man crew doing this task.
•         “(The highway departments) We’re not allowed to work within 10 ft of any wire, that’s the law.”

Line Crew

• “(O&R) they give us two guys,” said Ballard. “When we have a tree wrapped up in wires, (the two O&R workers) de-energize those wires then they give us the green light to touch the wires.”
• “That’s how we got from 105 down to six roads related to trees and wires.”

The first type of O&R crew is the middleman. After O&R finishes shutting off the wires and removing the trees from the wires, they call the police department who in turn contacts the highway department. Ballard said that using the police as a middleman wastes precious time.

With the second type of crew, the line crews, “(O&R and highway departments) We’re working side by side,” he said. “We work all day long together,” which is a faster.

However, “some highway departments don’t have the training or equipment” to do tree work so they have to use the first type of O&R crews.

For the Clarkstown Highway Department, “My guys are certified to do tree work and we have the equipment,” said Ballard. “We’ve always done our own tree work (so) O&R just sends us (those two people) to de-energize the wires and it out the middleman.”

As far as closed roads go, Ballard said that he and Clarkstown have been making new lists everyday and it’s always fluctuating and decreasing. He’s going to update Patch tonight with a new updated list of problem roads.

“The first thing we dealt with were roads that were totally blocked. Now we’re dealing with roads that are partially blocked,” he said. “We’re working with the main roads first, what we call collector roads, to open them up fully.” Collector roads are major ones and those with double yellow lines. Roads that are considered partially blocked are those where “a car can go by but has to go into the opposing lane to get through.” There are 22 partially blocked roads at the moment.

“We made another new list which is trees leaning on wires,” said Ballard. “The trees are not on the roads but are on wires. There’re 17 of those roads.”

“Then we’ll go on to secondary roads, going to the hardest-hit areas first, which is Nanuet and New City. They got it worst out of the five hamlets.”