Road agencies around Michigan are helping out with the response to ice storms in the northern Lower Peninsula last week.
Residents of counties including Otsego, Alpena, and Emmet are still waiting to get their power back after the ice knocked down power lines and trees throughout the region Saturday into Sunday. All of that debris has also made it difficult to access certain areas.
Speaking on the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast this week, MDOT North Region engineer Bob Wahl said some people who haven’t seen the damage would be shocked.
“The impacts are just astounding,” Wahl said. “As you drive up and down I-75 and you see all these trees that have been pulled down by the ice and then looking out across different landscapes and whole forests that are just at times almost looks like someone took hedge clippers and just trimmed the tops of all the trees off because they’re just not there anymore.”
Wahl says MDOT has been working to clear roads, which has been a challenge due to all of the downed power lines. Road crews from counties outside of the affected area have been lending a hand.
“In North region, it was kind of the northeast corner of the region that was hit. There’s 10 counties and all the counties that were surrounding that basically started calling and saying, ‘What can we do to help?’ So we basically at that point started having them, they started sending crews in.”
Wahl says the crews from other county road commissions have been relieving their counterparts in the affected counties so they can focus on their own county roads and not the larger state trunklines. MDOT, meanwhile, is also clearing those state trunklines.
Wahl noted the state roads are in better shape because they tend to have a more recessed tree line. He says road crews from as far away as Ottawa, Allegan, Kent, and Muskegon counties have been in the region helping out.
Meanwhile, it could still be a week or longer before everyone gets their electricity back.
