It was an expensive winter for county roads departments. Between overtime pay, additional salt and sand being put on roads, needing more snowblades, and repairs to damaged roads the costs have added up in Washington County. At this week’s Washington County Board of Supervisors meeting, County Engineer Jacob Thorius laid out some of the additional expenses following the hard, snowy, icy winter, “We put down 2,600 tons of salt or sand mix, so that’s a cost of about $120,000. We worked not quite 4,200 hours of manhours in just snow removal and operations for about $160,000. Just short of 400 [hours] of overtime at a cost of a little over $23,000. Guys earned about 1,700 hours worth of comp. time, instead of taking it as pay as overtime they’re taking it as time off later. So that’s 1,700 hours sitting on the books, which is $63,000 sitting on the books to be paid out at some point in time. All attributed to the snow.”

He said there was there was also additional cost for equipment, with about $30,000 for snowblades, $17,000 on tire chains mostly for motor graders, and about $75,000 in diesel fuel for snow removal operations.

This winter, according to the National Weather Service, Washington had nearly four feet of total snowfall. Thorius said in the first quarter of the year there were 12 different snow events. There were also multiple systems that brought ice and frigid temperatures, followed by a wet March that caused some flooding.