Kalispell street crews keep busy this spring
Kalispell’s streets are getting a good spring cleaning these days.
The city street department’s 10 workers are grading winter-weary gravel alleys, sweeping away ice-sanding material and accumulated debris, vacuuming away piles of leaves that have been raked into streets and cold-mix patching a few potholes.
The weather, however, isn’t cooperating yet on more aggressive road fixes such as asphalt cut-outs that completely replace a stretch of street surface.
“It helps to be dry for a certain length of time,” Street Superintendent Leonard Hogan said. “People who are making the asphalt, they’ll fire up their plants when the weather permits. If they have a good month with temperatures getting nice and they feel they can fire up, they will. But they might have to shut down again.”
So, until the city has a supply of hot-mix asphalt, the cut-outs will wait and the potholes will get filled with cold-mix.
Crack-sealing will start before long, he said, but it’s still too wet to make much headway now. Crews can start on the job by using the city’s hot-air lance, a combination air compressor and torch that cleans out and dries up cracks in asphalt that aren’t so soggy.
Road signs are being repaired and replaced, partially because the county has turned over some of its road system to the city. When workers finish printing the signs, they will replace wooden posts with steel posts and relocate signs to meet state code.
Last week street crews washed the streets and sidewalks in the downtown shopping area, along Meridian Road, around Hutton Ranch Road and Reserve Loop and along U.S. 93 South toward the Four Corners area.
The annual street sweeping helps control dust, but this year there’s a new dimension to the project: Leaves.
Trees that didn’t drop their load because of the sudden cold snap last fall are carpeting streets and clogging storm drains this spring. It doesn’t make sense to pull out the city’s two leaf machines now, Hogan said.
“We’re not set up to do the leaf pickup because that’s usually done in the fall,” he said. “[In the spring] people are supposed to bag them and put them in the alley” with trash pickup, or haul them away on their own.
Still, piles of leaves are showing up on the streets.
Hogan said the three street sweepers are picking up thin layers of leaves as they navigate the streets. But to get the piles, other crews are using a sweeper with a suction hose and another truck that the sewer department once used to clean out storm drains and manholes.
“Where they’ve already been, they go back probably half a dozen times,” Hogan said. “The majority of leaves don’t come all at once, and people rake what they have onto the boulevard or street and we go back and get them.”
He understands that some areas don’t have alleys and some residents simply can’t do the work of bagging and hauling, but “we’ve been taken advantage of — they’re throwing out their leaves but also their brush.”
It’s bound to get worse when residents start sprucing up their yards and gardens and alley clean-up begins. So Hogan put out a reminder to bundle brush in 4-foot lengths, bag or box up the leaves and grass clippings, and put them near trash bins but not directly alongside where they would interfere with the garbage trucks’ side-arm loaders.
Some of those brush piles have gotten so big that crews have had to use a front-end loader to clear them out, he said, along with discarded refrigerators and stoves that should be the residents’ responsibility. It all can cost the city money at the landfill, he said.
Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com