When your route for your morning commute is plowed clear of snow, you may not think about the work that goes behind making Washington County’s roads drivable during winter.

The Washington County Engineer’s Office has been preparing its snow and salt maintenance trucks for cleanup of paved and gravel roads during winter conditions. There are eight trucks for the approximate 160 miles of paved routes.

Washington County Engineer Jacob Thorius says an eleventh route was added for the gravel road routes, which he says has improved cleanup time, “I think it’s helped. It gets us out there a tad quicker. It’s hard to really notice it from the general public, because we’ve got 660 miles of gravel road. That’s 1,320 lane miles by the time you go down both sides. So it’s still a slow process but it allows us to go out there a tad quicker. We’ve cut the average motor grader territory down from 75 miles down to about 60.”

The county maintenance hours of operation are typically 5 a.m.-5 p.m. according to Thorius, and in the instance of snowfall he says the crews try to get paved roads cleared within one day and gravel roads within two days of the storm.