The Texas Department of Transportation is busy pretreating thousands of miles of local highways in advance of a winter storm that is predicted to arrive in North Texas late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
In the Fort Worth Division alone, TxDOT has dedicated approximately 140 vehicles to spread brine – a salt and water mixture designed to prevent and falling precipitation from freezing on the roadway – over the next 48 hours ahead of the storm.
Fifty of those trucks are assigned to Tarrant County alone, where they will be responsible for treating approximately 3,300 lane miles of highway. Stretched end-to-end that is like driving from Los Angeles to New York and then another 500 miles east into the Atlantic Ocean.
A representative from TxDOT urged drivers to use extra precaution when driving on elevated surfaces – like bridges, overpasses and highway interchanges – when the temperatures approach the freezing mark because they are prone to freezing over first.
