Maintenance crews have been on watch 24 hours a day to keep more than 50,000 miles of roadways safe and clear throughout California.
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00:00 California continues to be hit here with consecutive storms with heavy rain and
00:04 smell of snow in parts of the state. Now Caltrans is the California Department of
00:09 Transportation. Their crews manage more than 50,000 miles of California's
00:14 highways and Jim Shivers is public and legislative affairs manager with Caltrans.
00:19 Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure good to be with you this
00:24 morning. Absolutely Jim as we talked about behind the scenes it's been a busy
00:28 time for your crew here. What's the latest? What are conditions that you're
00:31 keeping up with at this point especially around Santa Barbara and Central Coast?
00:36 Well things are much better this morning. The storms have subsided. I guess you
00:43 could say we're now in in drainage mode but the thing that I noticed that
00:47 occurred in this recent set of storms is not so much the amount of mudslides or
00:53 flooding but a lot of trees came down. I think that there was a lot of saturation
01:00 and in the past 24-36 hours it seems like numerous trees came down in various
01:08 locations in our five-county district which stretches from Santa Barbara
01:13 Ventura County line to the south all the way up to the Santa Cruz Santa Clara
01:18 County line to the north. Okay Jim and how does this heavy rain and snow impact
01:24 Caltrans beyond this week's precipitation? Are roads and bridges
01:28 weakened? Does it change planning? What's what's the deal? Well because of the
01:34 ongoing maintenance and the number of construction projects and improvement
01:38 projects I would say that our system has fared quite well given the impact of
01:45 these storms. Our maintenance forces remain on storm patrol 24 hours a day.
01:51 They can respond to any location as needed. It's certainly safe for travelers
02:01 to go out and do their necessary business. Probably a bit easier to get
02:06 out today than in than in recent days. But I would say overall our system is
02:12 safe. Our maintenance crews are responding to various locations and then
02:18 our construction crews can also chime in as well. You know I want to ask Jim we
02:23 talk about this a lot with severe weather season across the Gulf and in
02:27 the south but you know I have to imagine it's being felt in California right now.
02:30 Severe weather fatigue or storm fatigue when you have so many major events in a
02:36 row and people are just tired. How is that impacting your crews? Are they kind
02:40 of just needing a breather at this point considering how bad the weather's been
02:44 or have people kind of been taking the time to just kind of deal with it on
02:47 their own a little bit in the meantime? You know we've had a lot of practice I
02:53 think in recent years given the Montecito debris flow a handful of years
02:59 ago. We've had some major slide activity on the Big Sur Coast. I think I realized
03:08 that our crews are busy. They can be stretched but I can tell you that they
03:16 enjoy the work. We enjoy the work. We understand the importance of
03:21 infrastructure of mobility and that it's always our goal to do whatever it takes
03:29 to make sure that these highways remain open for the public. We really don't mind
03:35 doing the work at all. We appreciate you guys doing all that work and keeping the
03:39 public safe. Jim Shivers, Public and Legislative Affairs Manager with Caltrans.
03:43 Thank you so much for joining us. Stay safe out there and again thank you for
03:46 all you and your team do. Again thank you. Appreciate it. Absolutely.