Highways Adverse Weather & Winter Service Plan

Adverse Weather Overview

The highway network is of vital importance to ensure Carmarthenshire continues to function during adverse weather events. From facilitating blue light services responding to emergencies or helping learners get to school, ensuring people get to work or food gets to shelves, the highway network provides a vital lifeline for local our communities. Keeping this lifeline as open and accessible as possible during adverse weather is a ley role undertaken by the County Council’s Highways & Transportation Team.

Carmarthenshire has the second largest highway network in Wales, and it is not always possible to ensure all 3,500Km of highway are open and accessible at all times. A risk-based approach has therefore been adopted utilising the Highway Network Hierarchy to focus operational resources towards the most important arterial routes.

The Highways & Transportation Team’s operational response to adverse weather is scaled up or down in accordance with the forecast weather impacts. Where the weather event is particularly significant, a multi-agency response may be triggered in accordance with the Council’s Emergency Planning (Civil Contingencies) procedures. This Highways Adverse Weather & Winter Service Plan may be mobilised as part of this to support either a multi-agency approach, to respond to a Highways Emergency or activated singularly.

The objective of the Highways Adverse Weather & Winter Service Plan is to ensure a resilient highway network during hazardous weather events. In line with the Code of Practice “Well-Managed Highways Infrastructure” the Adverse Weather & Winter Service Plan now covers all weather impacts on the highway network. This is an expansion on the traditional approach which concentrated on operations to tackle the risk of snow and ice and reflects the wider impacts of climate change on our weather.

This wider remit of weather related impacts include:

• Heavy rain and Storms events
• Tidal, Surface water and River flooding
• Extreme winds
• Prolonged High Temperatures / Heatwaves
• Extreme winter weather

The impacts of these events are increasingly evident and can significantly influence the lives of our residents and highway users. The different weather events require specific responses designed in accordance with the risk presented. As a result our approach has been expanded with a greater focus on weather forecasting and information, resource management and operational planning for the particular weather event forecast or experienced.