MoDOT crews worked around the clock battling winter storms

Missouri Department of Transportation crews worked around the clock during the winter storms last week in Ozark County, trying hard to keep state highways clear – but losing the battle when the snow was falling fastest.

“Whatever route we were working – like [Highway] 160 – by the time we got to Caulfield [on the Ozark-Howell County line] and came back, you couldn’t even tell we’d been over it,” said Bruce Bales, supervisor of MoDOT’s Gainesville shed. 

The MoDOT crews’ nonstop efforts were complicated by temperatures that fell to zero or below, which meant nothing would melt, even if the crews could have managed to get enough snow shoved off the highways to treat the pavement with road-salt mixtures. 

MoDOT employees worked 12-hour shifts, from 6:30 to 6:30, for several days and nights, Bales said. Five plow-equipped trucks and one loader worked full-time out of the Gainesville shed. 

Due to concerns related to the spread of the covid-19 virus, “it’s one person to each piece of equipment for each shift,” Bales said. “And at the end of the 12-hour shift, you have to disinfect the truck for the next shift coming in – clean it and spray it down.”

“It was all a kind of blur,” said Shawn Shipley, manager of MoDOT’s Dora shed. Shipley faced a few more challenges than usual during last week’s snowstorms: first, because he was sick during part of the bad weather. And then he lost “half his fleet” of four plow-equipped trucks when the snow was at its worst. 

One truck, driven by Jeff Strong, went off the roadway and rolled over near Highways H and PP between Dawt and Dora. Emergency crews removed the windshield to get Strong out of the vehicle, and he was taken by ambulance to Ozarks Healthcare (formerly Ozarks Medical Center) in West Plains, where he was treated and released. 

Another truck from the Dora MoDOT shed also slid into the ditch and “almost rolled,” Shipley said. 

“After a quick snow like that, the drifts were so wide you couldn’t tell where the road was, especially at night,” Shipley said. “And when you’re breaking it open for the first time, that made it so much worse.”

For Shipley, it was one last storm before his retirement begins Thursday after 25 years with MoDOT. On Monday, describing his crew’s hard work last week, he recalled that, for 20 years, his snow-plowing route always included the steep Zanoni hill on Highway 181. Now, he said, the hill is part of the Gainesville shed’s service area while the Dora employees tend to roads farther east. 

Shipley and Bales praised their crews. 

“I was proud of them,” Bales said. “I have three or four guys who live on county roads, and everyone made it in for every shift. It might take 45 minutes to an hour to drive to work when it’s slick, but they know you leave early. We all know the job and what it asks of us, going in.”

Shipley also commended the Dora shed’s employees and its “really good crew leader,” Will Sharnhorst, who oversaw a lot of the work during the storm because of Shipley’s illness and his impending retirement. 

“My guys took care of a lot of it,” Shipley said, adding that he has “definitely enjoyed the people I’ve worked with” through the years. 

There will be no retirement party, he said, because of the covid pandemic. “We can’t get together like we might have because of that,” he said.

He might be retiring, but Shipley won’t stop working. He plans to spend “a lot more time” on the farm where he lives with his wife, Teri. And he expects he’ll “start working at some other side job and doing carpentry work. I’m just changing hats,” he said.

Despite the MoDOT and Ozark County Road and Bridge crews’ hard work, the storm was blamed for dozens of slide-offs and vehicle accidents last week. Tecumseh tow company owner J. B. Duke, who responded to the Dora MoDOT truck accidents, said Sunday he had worked 12-14 accident calls during the snowy week, “and that doesn’t include the slide-offs,” he said. 

Among the crashes he had worked were “a couple of head-ons – one close to Cloud 9 and one at the curves at Caulfield– and a rollover on [Highway] 101 with four little kids and two rollovers on O Highway,” he said.

The work resulted in some frostbitten fingers he got while working one of the O Highway crashes when it “minus 8,” he said. “But we got all the jobs done.”