Roads Department-Maintenance

About Roads Department-Maintenance

Outside the Columbus city limits the roads run in a flat grid of section lines, gravel giving way to blacktop only where the farm-to-market routes lead toward the grain elevators and the highway. Roads Department-Maintenance keeps those rural stretches open through the winter, plowing county roads that see far less traffic than 23rd Street downtown but carry the same weight in bad weather -- a school bus, a grain truck, an ambulance headed toward town. The open ground west and south of Columbus takes the wind hard, with nothing but the odd shelterbelt to break a drift before it piles across a road at the same low spot every storm. Crews work those known trouble spots first, then move down the grid mile by mile, sanding the steep spots and the low crossings where a car is most likely to lose traction. It's a different kind of route than city plowing -- longer, lonelier, and dependent on knowing exactly which mile of Platte County road always fills in first.