Boone County repairing broken road graders

Boone County Road and Bridge had to get creative in order to fill out its fleet of road graders.

The department responsible for clearing roads of snow and ice in the county had issues with three road graders on Friday. The county uses road graders to clear off gravel roads, as opposed to plow trucks. Assistant director Bryan Boyce said the county’s vendor loaned it two road graders, and the department outfitted a dump truck to serve as a road grader in the meantime.

Boyce said two of the broken road graders had issues with injectors, while one had a broken diesel exhaust fluid pump. All three are under warranty, so the vendor should fix them, Boyce said.

“This is a rare event,” Boyce said. “We have an aggressive equipment replacement program. We usually are in pretty good shape equipment-wise. We have also been running this equipment nonstop for the most part since the first of the year.”

Boyce said the dump truck would take a toll on the gravel road it worked on. The county is responsible for repairing any damage to gravel roads during snow or ice removal.