Rain causing an impact on some Cerro Gordo County roads

MASON CITY — With the rain Sunday night into Monday morning, some area roads may be closed due to water over the road.

Cerro Gordo County Engineer Brandon Billings told the Board of Supervisors today that it’s because culverts are still frozen. “All of the culverts are frozen solid but the surface is not, so surface drainage as it builds up in the ditches will eventually cross the roads. In general, we’re not going to close highways unless we see erosion damage occurring or other things undermining. We’re going to try and limit the road closures to the gravels to prevent damage so that the roads don’t become impassable in the near future.”

Billings says there’s a website where you can keep track of roads that are closed in Cerro Gordo County.  “One of the ways we keep track of this and put it out to the public in a live way, there’s a thing called ‘County 511”. If you go to the state 511, up in the upper right corner, there’s a drop-down menu where you can go to the link that says County 511. If you click on Cerro Gordo County, it will show you all the roads that are currently closed because of flooding, it will show all the low-graded bridges, and during construction season, it will always show where our construction projects are.”

Billings says with warmer weather coming, that will have an impact on the roads.   “As we look at the forecast, a lot of 40-degree days coming, so in the short-term here in the next couple of weeks, there’s going to be a lot of very greasy roads, because the surface is going to thaw, and there’s going to be the ice lines down there that stops the water from saturating. So we’re going to have some very slick, nasty roads for a while here. Then it’s going to freeze at night and become very rough sometimes, so we’re just going to have a period of tough comments for a while.”

As of 11 o’clock this morning, some roads in the southern portion of the county were closed due to flooding. Those included:

 

== B-55 just west of US Highway 65    

== Pheasant Avenue between County Road B-55 and Rockwell

== 140th Street between Lark and Mallard Avenues southeast of Swaledale

== A portion of 140th Street between Spruce and Thrush, as well as another portion of 140th between Thrush and Vine. 

 

Click here to directly link to the Cerro Gordo County 511 road map.