For those of you living on a gravel road, there is no immediate relief. In the summer it is bumpy and dusty, in the winter it is slippery and the last to be plowed, and in the Spring it is like mud soup. Sound familiar? A solution, of course, is pavement but even that has its drawbacks as it tends to increase the amount of traffic on the road as well as speeds.

Smoothing out bumpy roads requires grading with a blade truck or a motor grader. This grading is usually done after a rain because then the road is soft enough for us to smooth it out. When dry, the clay becomes compacted and we are not able to cut down into the hard surface and any that is removed will not stick in the holes. Sometimes in the spring this clay makes the roads slippery. It is a hard job to get the right balance of clay, stone and sand on a gravel road. Too little clay and the road quickly develops sand holes and soft spots, too much clay and the road is slippery every time it rains. Heavily traveled roads are difficult to maintain. Generally a gravel road holds up pretty good with up to 100 cars per day, more cars than that and we have problems.

Potholes in gravel roads can be graded out if minor, but the larger ones must have gravel put in them. We spend a good share of the spring, summer and fall hauling gravel from our pits to patch gravel roads. If temporary truck traffic tears a road up, the truckers will frequently have the road repaired if we ask them to.

We typically spread 250,000 gallons of brine on gravel Roads in a year. This has two purposes; it helps to hold the surface together and, of course, reduces the dust. We get our brine from a commercial supplier who spreads it at our direction. A Road Commission is not required to brine roads, but is done as a service to the citizens. We generally do not brine where there are no homes. We try to respond to calls on dusty roads, but with all the miles of gravel roads and the cost it is hard to do as good a job as we would like to do. In some counties the townships bear the entire cost of brining the roads, but so far the Road Commission has covered this cost in Otsego County.