ORR - Snowmelt and excessive rain combined in a perfect storm last weekend to wreak havoc on numerous unpaved North Country roads, leading to numerous temporary closures.
And while roads in the region around Orr were reopened by Monday, heavy runoff flooding into area streams threatened an old rural bridge on Tuesday.
Rain and thunderstorms swept through the region on Friday and Saturday, dropping between three and five inches of moisture in northwestern St. Louis County onto roads already softened and saturated with snowmelt in the past couple of weeks. The runoff caused washout damage to some roads and flooded others.
King Road running along Moose Lake in Orr and County Road 535 in Greaney were the first area road closures on Saturday morning, and Range Line Road between Willow River Road and Nett Lake Road was closed on Sunday.
Other roads reported to have significant washout damage while still passable included Nelson Road in Crane Lake and County Road 24 on the west end of Lake Vermilion.
“The water has nowhere to go, it can’t get in through the ditches, so it finds its way onto the road,” said Dale Johnson, Public Works District Four Superintendent based in Cook. “The culverts are open, but they can only handle so much. When they’re full, water starts to go over the road and then it will groove and wash out.”
County workers started tackling the King Road issue on Saturday, but the weather remained a challenge.
“It was a little trying because it was still raining so hard,” Johnson said. “We would get it filled in and it would rain hard and take it away.”
However, once the storms cleared away and runoff started to slow, gravel truck and grader operators went to work in earnest and had all three roads back open by Monday, leaving behind obvious patches of smoothly graded roadbed.
“I commend my crew,” Johnson said. “They are some excellent operators and they do a really bang up job out there. They come out all times of the day and through the weekends. They’ve got a lot of skill and they do a great job for us.”
However, not all roads were fully restored by Monday. “One foreman did tell me that County Road 180, which goes up to Elephant Lake, right now is underwater,” Johnson said Tuesday morning. “The road is covered but it’s passable. The rivers and creeks have gotten so high now and it’s coming over. Hopefully in a day or two it should drop and get off the road again.”
But high water in the Sturgeon River caused the county to close an older bridge southwest of Linden Grove on Tuesday.
“This one is part of Murray Road/County Road 931 where it crosses the Sturgeon River,” a press release said. “The water level has gotten so high it’s nearly touching the bottom of the bridge deck. Public Works has closed the bridge as a precaution and expects it will likely remain closed through the week.”
Meanwhile, regular grading work has begun in portions of the county that weren’t affected by the recent heavy rains, and Johnson understands residents here are anxious to see graders on the roads here, too.
“There are so many potholes that it’s a real challenge to drive on them. It’s a challenge even to try to maintain them,” he said. “We always have this in the spring, but with this continued snow and rain this is one of the worst years that I’ve seen in the spring for trying to maintain our gravel roads. These snows sit there on the gravel and it just it saturates the roads and makes them so slimy and soft that we can’t really do anything. If we could get even a couple of days of some sunshine and a little wind that would help.”
Noticeably absent from most of the repairs were any signs of heavy equipment tire damage one might expect to see on softened roads. County graders are equipped with rear-mounted rollers that compact and smooth the roadbed, Johnson said. In addition to the main facility in Cook, the county stations two graders in Buyck and one in Kabetogama.