Why a Gritting Route Falls Apart Mid-Storm
A gritting route is planned before the storm and is wrong within an hour of it starting. Snow falls unevenly, one truck breaks down, a road closes, and the plan that was optimal at midnight is being improvised by radio at three. Nobody in the depot can see where the fleet actually is.
Winter operations are judged on the roads that did not get treated, and those are almost never the result of a bad plan. They are the result of a good plan that could not be revised while it was failing. The one thing to withhold is your service standards: treatment priorities, response times, and the routes a authority is contractually required to cover are public commitments and belong in the authority's own documents.
The storm is followed across seven scenes: one on the plan at midnight, one on the first divergence, two on live positions replacing radio calls, one on reassigning a route when a vehicle drops out, one on what the duty manager can evidence afterwards, and one on how the next plan improves.
