County Road Department gets new equipment that will reduce ditch work time

On Friday, the Whitley County Road Department cleaned out about one and one-half miles of ditch line on Maple Creek Road using a recently purchased piece of new equipment that should dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to conduct ditching work.

Whitley County Road Department Supervisor Truman Prewitt said that it would have taken about one week to accomplish the same amount of work using traditional equipment like a grader and loader and about six workers.

Not only can the work be done much faster with the new smaller piece of equipment, but it can also be accomplished using about half of the manpower, Prewitt noted.

"They call it a maintainer but it looks like a small road grader," said Whitley County Judge-Executive Pat White Jr. "It is made with additional tools. You can put any Bobcat attachment, powered or manual on the front or rear of it. It is a real versatile machine."

White said that he hopes to primarily use the new piece of equipment to pull material out of ditches with the grader blade and then use the use the loader of the front to put that material into a waiting truck.

A brush attachment on the back of the vehicle can then be used to clean up the roadway when workers are done.
The fiscal court recently voted to purchase the $120,000 maintainer, which arrived at the road department last week. This is about half the price of a new full-size road grader.

White said there are several other advantages to the new maintainer.

For instance, using a 12-foot grader, road department employees would have to stop traffic for significant periods of time on a small two-lane road in order to work on it because traffic couldn’t get around the bigger piece of equipment.
With the new maintainer, this isn’t the case.

"With the old equipment, you are holding the roadway up more. You are using a whole lot more men by the time you have flagers and multiple pieces of machinery," White said. "This one machine will be able to do what several people would be able to do with the old system."

With the new equipment, White said only about two or three people are needed, including one to operate the maintainer, one to drive the truck and possibly a third person to flag traffic.

With a 10-foot grader blade, the road department can use the maintainer to work on smaller roads where a big grader has difficulty operating, White said.

"We will also use it to plow snow in the winter time. We have a loader to load the snow if we need to and we have a grader to grade the road," White added.

White said that the county would like to purchase more equipment like this given the number of small narrow roads in the county, but funding for such purchases is an issue.