BEAR Scotland’s winter team has worked throughout the winter season to keep trunk routes in the South East of Scotland safe and clear.

In total 16,752 tonnes of salt was used to treat roads and 477 tonnes of liquid de-icer was sprayed onto major bridge structures.

As ever, the winter service began in October and has been relatively manageable compared to some Scottish winters. That said,  both December and March saw 14 day period’s where road surface temperatures were well below zero at night and often not rising above zero during the day, with some of the Borders routes going below -10 celcius.

There were 22 forecast snow days in total. That said in the majority of these, the forecast snow was worse than what actually occurred. There were only two occasions where snow accumulated on the motorway network.

The majority of snow days were confined to the higher sections of the single carriageway routes to the south of Edinburgh, in many of these, the forecast snow did not impact at road level. There were also periods of very cold dry conditions, particularly in March.

There were some instances of heavy rain which caused localised closures trunk roads due to flooding. Where these issues occurred, we sought to clear as quickly as possible using pumps and vactor units. However, at the end of December the A702 was not re-opened until the following day when the water level of the adjacent river, which had burst its banks, had receded.

No matter what the conditions, our dedicated team and fleet of winter maintenance vehicles dealt them in a way that causes as little disruption as possible for the travelling public.