PLANO, Texas — Crews with the North Texas Tollway Authority will begin round the clock shifts at noon Wednesday.
“As the rain tapers off, we’ll start to get that heavy salt on the roadway. And that will mix with whatever water is left behind and kind of form a brine (which) lowers the freezing temperature of whatever should come after that,” NTTA spokesperson Michael Rey said. “We’ll be in good position.”
Rey said crews will focus first on treating elevated surfaces like ramps and overpasses.
“The wind that goes under an overpass tends to chill it down quite a bit. It has nothing to do but to freeze. It has nowhere to insulate it and protect it,” Rey said. “PGBT out west of I-35: Quite a bit of that is elevated. You see the big ramps from George Bush and DNT. DNT and SRT are some of our really high ramps. And again, we’ll put a lot of salt on them to make sure that whatever comes and hits it, it turns to something that is very, very easily dealt with.”
The NTTA uses technology that allows crews to monitor how the roads are doing in real time.
“We have sensors in our Safety Operations Center that allow us to know whether a roadway is getting colder; whether it’s turning into a freezing roadway; whether what’s on top of it, be it ice, water, is a liquor or a solid. So it alerts us to how a roadway is behaving.”
If drivers have car trouble, get stuck on a NTTA toll road, or have an emergency on an NTTA roadway, they can call #999 or dial 9-1-1 to be connected directly to the NTTA Safety Operations Center, a 24/7/365 emergency dispatch facility, Rey said.
When a call is received, NTTA’s Roadside Safety Services (RSS) crews and/or Department of Public Safety troopers will be on the way to help, but response times could be impacted by driving conditions, according to Rey.