The winter storm along the East Coast is producing impressive snow numbers, and all that snowfall means
thousands of miles of roads need to be plowed, and now, a new project is giving
states high-tech tools to save more lives.
Snow plows are typically dispatched according to the weather models, the forecast for where the trouble spots will be. There are some new technologies being tried out in some places that turns them into mobile weather labs, using sensors to target the iciest roads.
Each winter, states and
cities spend tens of millions of dollars to keep roads safe, but accidents related to wintry weather still
claim the lives of more than 4,000 Americans a year.
In Michigan, the state's
Department of Transportation, known as MDOT, maintains nearly 10,000
miles of that state's roadways.
This winter, Michigan,
along with Minnesota and Nevada, are rolling out a new weapon for tackling ice
and snow-covered roads - custom-designed sensors that measure road and weather
conditions attached to hundreds of plow trucks. The goal: ensure that
hard-hit roads that need immediate plowing are prioritized.
Steven Cook, project
coordinator at MDOT, said, "Prior to this technology, we were somewhat in
the dark. We had to kind of guess where we needed to be. We had to kind of guess what the forecast was going to lay out in front of us over the next six, 12 or 24 hours."
Sensors gauge temperature
and humidity, as well as road conditions through the vehicle's diagnostics.
Cook said, "So you
get a diagnostic reading, you get things like traction control, you get stability, you get ABS. The other device is what is called a surface-monitoring device that picks up ambient air temperature, it picks up humidity,
it picks up dew point, it picks up surface temperature."
Data is combined with
computer weather models and relayed back to maintenance garages. The
information is then displayed in each vehicle so that supervisors and drivers
have a near real-time snapshot of every mile of road the trucks have traveled.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GO0gAfr_n0
But it's not just
safety. States and cities can also save
money by reducing the amount of excess chemicals and rock salt unnecessarily
spread on roads.
http://www.perloasis.org/snow-elimination-is-an-essential-evil-when-it-comes-to-having-a-house/
