Icy conditions grip the county as salt supplies leave officials worried

All city and county schools closed until conditions improve

By Naoise Coogan

The sub zero temperatures being experienced in Kilkenny city and county have taken their toll on businesses, families, schools, and the support services, over the past number of days leaving many services closed until further notice.

With temperatures at -7.7 degrees and grass temperatures at -10.7 yesterday at time of going to press, the big freeze has clearly set in curtailing normal life for many residents in the county. The worst affected areas are around the east of the county including Thomastown, Goresbridge, Graiguenamanagh and Gowran.

Kilkenny Castle has been closed by the OPW until conditions improve while rail services between Kilkenny, Dublin and Waterford are running as normal. Bus Eireann and Kavanagh’s buses continue to operate on the primary routes however, local bus services have been suspended.

Although the cold snap had been forecast - nobody could have foreseen the length of time that it would last and therefore all of the support services are under huge strain in their efforts to deal with the problems associated with the arctic conditions.

John Mulholland director of services at Kilkenny County Council said that up until now, the local authority had believed that there would be enough salt to cope with the road gritting that would be required to deal with the cold spell, however, since the snowfall on Wednesday evening, almost four times as much salt is required to make the roads safe for motorists and supplies are now at a dangerously low level.

“The roads are extremely hungry on salt at the moment,” he told the Kilkenny Advertiser and this is really a very precarious situation. We are expecting a shipment of salt in from Limerick today and we hope that this will keep us going for another while but even now the salt is less effective than it was as the temperatures are so low and it may not work adequatley. We had thought that we had enough salt to last us through the cold spell, but when it snowed we had to use so much more salt than is required for just icy conditions and this diminished our supplies. Hopefully this delivery will come in and we will be able to continue gritting the main routes throughout the county, but this one shipment won’t be enough - we are going to need supplies replenished more regularly. And even today we don’t know if there is going to be rationing in Limerick,” he said.

The footpaths in Kilkenny city and surrounding areas are also extremely slippery and council workers have been out with buckets of salt manually salting the footpaths in the city centre to make them safe. However, footpaths in the housing estates in the suburbs are still extremely dangerous as are the roads in these areas.

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