Ice ruts and hard-packed snow have made many of Prince Albert's residential streets tricky to drive down. (Nigel Maxwell/paNOW Staff)

By Rob Mahon

Icy Rutted Roads

Ice ruts in roads causing headaches for drivers

Feb 15, 2022 | 1:00 PM

A freeze-thaw cycle, more snow than usual, and long stretches of extreme cold haven’t been easy on the roads in Prince Albert this winter. You’ve probably seen that for yourself if you’ve driven through side streets lined with ice ruts and rolling patches of hardened snow.

City residents have taken to various social media channels to complain about the dangers posed by rut-filled roads. The icy streets and alleys can be damaging to vehicles on several fronts.

“The most common issues that we see come through the door have been things like worn ball joints, tie rods, a lot of alignment issues,” said Adam Hulowski, general manager at Perry’s Automotive in Prince Albert. “It doesn’t really take much in the first place to knock a vehicle’s alignment out, then you factor in six-inch ruts kind of tossing and pulling your steering that can cause a lot of issues with the alignment.”

According to Hulowski, alignment issues can slowly turn into other problems, including tire wear, wandering while driving on the highway, vibrations, and pulls. Whether or not it’s ruts causing the issues can be difficult to tell, however.

“It can be a fine line whether or not it’s normal wear and tear or if it’s been caused by ruts,” Hulowski said. “It does take a trained technician to spot that. Ruts are definitely going to cause more wear and tear on wearable items like ball joints. I’d say overall just living in Canada, in our conditions here, you would probably replace suspension items a lot more up here than you would in a place like Florida.”

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It can be similarly difficult to tell for certain whether damage leading to insurance claims was directly caused by ruts. For SGI’s purposes, ruts fall into a larger category called roadbed collisions.

“If somebody has run into something like some hardened ice or snow,” said Tyler McMurchy, SGI’s media relations manager. “Whether it’s those ruts on the ground or perhaps a pile of snow that has been left by roadside equipment, that might result in a claim that would be in that category.”

SGI has seen a number of those claims in the Prince Albert area this winter, however. In December, there were 26 such claims in the area and there were 44 more claims in January. Not all of them are guaranteed to be due to ruts, of course.

As a driver himself, Hulowski has noticed the roads in the city are in rough shape this season. He’s not looking to sling blame however, and seemed to sympathize with city crews trying to keep up with a winter that has been both noticeably colder and unusually snowy.

“I know they (the city) have their crews out non-stop,” said Hulowski. “Just like us, once they start to get caught up with that initial snowfall, we get hammered again. You just can’t get to those secondary streets where you need to take it down right to the pavement and scrape off those ruts.”

McMurchy added he didn’t think the claim numbers they’d seen this winter were extraordinarily high as the winter is their busy season for collision claims.

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rob.mahon@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @RobMahonPxP