Heavy trucks taking toll on rural roads

Loads in remote areas

Jon Boyd, Oct 20, 10.

Heavy truck loads - especially those related to the energy industry, are destroying some Texas rural roads, according to the Texas Tribune. Some of the culprits include materials and equipment for wind farms, gas drilling equipment, and even a generator for a coal plant. TxDOT issued over seven times the number of super-heavy vehicle permits in 2009 compared to 2005, according to the story:

Heavy truck traffic, some of it related to the energy industry, has increased sharply across the state in recent years, and it’s taken a heavy toll on rural roadways. The number of super-heavy vehicle permits — granted by TxDOT to trucks over 254,300 pounds — rose from 208 in fiscal year 2005 to 1,525 in fiscal year 2009, due to both increased economic activity and improved processes for identifying heavy loads. In February, a record 1.7 million pound load moved through Texas, a generator bound for a coal plant in Riesel from the Port of Houston.

To TxDOT’s chagrin, trucking companies and the industries they serve rarely shoulder the cost of fixing the damage, which can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single state road.
“We’ve seen a lot of our roadways have base [problems], edges drop off, rutting, bridge hits, shoulder damage,” says Jodi Hodges, a public information officer in TxDOT’s Fort Worth district, which has seen heavy roadway damage from trucks associated with natural gas drilling in the Barnett Shale. In 2007, when natural gas prices were high and drilling was booming, the agency spent more than $23 million in road rehabilitation funds in Johnson County alone — more than one-third of the available funds — plus an additional $11 million from other sources.

Trucking advocates point out that even if they do not cover the costs of damage to state roads, they sometimes help pay for the upkeep of city and county roads. In addition, the heaviest loads move on trucks with extra axles, to distribute the weight. “It is not a question of damage being done to roads because of weight,” says John Esparza, president and chief executive of the Texas Motor Transportation Association. “It is about the dispersement of weight [and having] the proper vehicle.”

TxDOT officials also say the sheer number of trucks, even if they are not super-heavy loads, makes an impact.

In West Texas, officials have noticed increased damage to the roadways over the past five years as the wind industry has flourished. (Texas now has the most wind turbines in the country by far.) In the Abilene-Sweetwater area — the heart of the wind rush — repairing mostly wind-related damage to FM-89 in Taylor County will cost TxDOT more than $179,000 this fiscal year.

Young says that often the most damage is caused not by the wind turbines themselves but by other materials, such as the concrete used to build the foundation of the turbine. Consider the case of FM-97, the heavily patched road leading up to a wind farm called Whirlwind: The company that owns the farm, RES Americas, built a spur road leading to the farm site, and hauling an estimated 50,000 tons of base material to build that spur took a toll on the larger road, which was constructed long before such farms were in the picture.

Indeed, the damage to FM-97 is almost entirely in the eastbound lane leading to the farm; the other lane — traveled by the trucks after they dumped their loads — is nearly unscathed.

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(Photo credit: Cod Gabriel)