November 2023 Emergency Gravel Road Repairs

During the latter part of November, the Highway Department along with Northern Improvement, Circle C Enterprises and Knife River conducted an all-out effort to haul a mixture of high-grade gravel, Blended Base and Crushed Concrete on a number of gravel roadways throughout the County. An unusually long cold snap in October created a frozen layer below our gravel roadways, once the weather turned warmer in November the roadways started to thaw from the top down. Since the water could not be absorbed into the road bed (due to the frozen layer) the surface gravels became super saturated. Gravels with high Plasticity Index (PI) are prone to rutting under these conditions and made driving conditions hazardous. Fearing that this could also happen in the spring, it was decided to try and firm up as many roadways as we could (by adding high-grade gravel, Blended Base and Crushed Concrete to the roadways) before winter set in for good. (See attached map material locations) During the coming years we will continue to monitor these locations to evaluate the performance of each of the repair materials.