Gilmer County’s roads and bridges did not take too much of a pounding from a storm that brought a deluge of rain and heavy winds Tuesday, Jan. 9.
“We were exceptionally lucky this go-round. We’ve had instances in the past where we’ve had multiple blowouts. We had a lot of trees down that had to be cleared, but we were blessed that we didn’t have any blowouts, (as well as) no structural damage or big issues,” said Ryan Steingruber, county public works director. “We had a lot of surface gravel get washed off on quite a few (gravel roads), so we’ve been trying to get those graded and graveled back as calls have come in on them.”
Rising creek waters did come up over Evans Road, which is a gravel road, resulting in the lone county road closure from that storm. The road crew was able to fix the damage and later open that road in the Clear Creek area back to traffic by day’s end, Steingruber noted.
“The biggest one we had to deal with was on Evans Road (where) it ended up flooding across the bridge,” Steingruber said. “The edges had started to wash out in between the two 10-foot pipes that are underneath the bridge. If we had gotten a few more hours of rain, we may have had a wash out on that bridge. We were able to get the trees blocking the culverts pulled out.”
A similar situation occurred with trees, limbs and storm debris lodging up against the bridge over Macedonia Road.
“The bridge had a lot of stuff blocked up against it, including limbs and some trees that were knocked down in the water. We were able to get out there the next day with our equipment and get the bridge cleared out to get the water flowing back again,” Steingruber said.
The road department was still removing pieces of downed trees from the sides of county roads on Wednesday and Thursday, while trying to prepare for another big storm that rolled through on Friday.
“When storms come through like this, our initial push is to get the trees cut down and out of the way so the roads are clear. In the days following is when we go through and get the trees picked up and out of the ditches and get those cleared,” Steingruber said.
The University of Georgia’s weather monitoring network measured more than four inches of cumulative rainfall in Ellijay between Jan. 9 and 12.
As for Friday’s storm, Steingruber said downed trees again accounted for the majority of calls, but, thankfully, there were no reports of major damage to roads or bridges.
“The guys were swamped with tree down calls. We were very lucky the rains were not worse on the second go-round, or it could’ve been much worse for us countywide,” he added. “I want to thank our county citizens for reaching out and letting us know about the issues they’re seeing on the roads. We can’t fix an issue if we don’t know about it.”