Road Crews Prepare County Roads for Winter Storms
Replacing damaged culverts is one of the most important ways the County of Santa Clara's Roads and Airports Department gets mountain roads ready to handle the rains of winter
With winter approaching, County of Santa Clara road crews are busy preparing for the rainy season, making sure that 660 miles of unincorporated County roadways are ready to handle Mother Nature’s annual deluge.
The importance of this work was never clearer than it was last year, when the Bay Area was drenched by one of the wettest winters in recent memory, causing extensive damage to roads and creating dangerous conditions for motorists.
One of the biggest tasks for road crews this time of year is replacing damaged culverts, which are pipes that carry stormwater runoff under a road, protecting the roadway from damage and erosion.
This is particularly important in the mountains on the eastern and western boundaries of Santa Clara County, where stormwater rushes downhill in torrents, carrying culvert-clogging debris.
“We replace culverts as part of a proactive preventative maintenance program to protect our roads from washout due to large rainstorms,” explained Harry Freitas, director of the County’s Roads and Airports Department. “Our community needs a resilient roadway system to rely on in emergency situations.”
The West Yard of the County’s Road & Signal Operations Division, which is responsible for the Santa Cruz Mountains, expects to replace as many as a dozen culverts before the winter holidays.
One morning last week, a crew placed a new corrugated steel pipe underneath Thompson Road, a few miles west of Lexington Reservoir, having dug up the road and removed an old pipe that had rotted out.
As sunlight streamed through the bay laurel and redwood trees, the team poured base rock, an aggregate with the appearance of wet gravel, over the 30-foot-long pipe. Workers raked the base rock smooth and tamped it down with a machine known as a jumping jack, which looks like the leg of a hyperactive robot.
They repeated that process a few times until the trench was filled in, then resurfaced the road with hot asphalt. The final steps were building a concrete headwall on the upslope side of the road and installing baskets of gabion rocks on both sides to prevent soil erosion.
The project will protect the road this winter and help keep residents safe. Thompson Road comes to a dead end a couple miles past the project site, meaning there is only one way in and out for the people who live there. If the road fails in a storm, there’s no way for residents to drive down the hill for food and supplies or emergency vehicles to get uphill to their homes.
In addition to replacing damaged or worn-out culverts, County road crews spend the fall clearing out culverts that are still in good shape and cleaning out roadside ditches and shoulders to allow stormwater to flow freely downhill. They also use a vacuum truck to clean trash, debris and sediment out of drains on County expressways.
You can help keep our road maintenance crews safe – along with other drivers and pedestrians – by slowing down and being careful when approaching work zones on our roadways, especially during stormy weather.
To report an issue with a County-operated roadway, from a pothole to a malfunctioning traffic signal, visit the Roads and Airports Department’s service request webpage. The page shows you how to submit service requests online or download the Mobile Citizen app to your smartphone.