A NEW £120,000 machine could not be used in Bolton's first Arctic blast of the winter - because the snow had made salt at the council depot TOO WET.

It meant the new mechanised salt hopper, designed to speed up loading of gritter lorries, was lying idle during the worst weather of the winter so far.

Bolton Council stress that gritters were out in force and no delays were caused in getting salt on the roads.

But it has been revealed that the quick-loading hopper will not be able to be fully used until summer when a new salt storage barn is built at the council's Mayor Street depot.

Group engineer for highway maintenance Richard Wilson said the council faced a dilemma.

The salt barn cannot be built until the current stock of salt and grit is used up.

He said: "Unfortunately because the barn is to be built where the pile of salt now stands, we have to wait until most of the salt is used up.

"The cost of moving the salt somewhere else is uneconomic which means we just have to wait until the pile goes down.

"Because the salt is a different weight when it is wet it makes the hopper difficult to operate so we only operate it when the salt is reasonably dry. It hasn't hampered our operation and we have been able to use the hopper in dry spells." When the hopper is not in use, dumper trucks are used to fill the gritter lorries.

The machine, which can take up to 7,000 tons of salt, was bought to speed up the turn round time of lorries at the depot.

Council chiefs had expected to build the salt barn last summer but a mild winter meant there was still a large stock of salt left where the barn was due to be built.

Mr Wilson added: "There is no way the effectiveness of the gritting has been compromised by the difficulty in using the hopper.

"For example, we gritted the roads on Saturday, Sunday and Monday so there was a layer of salt under the snow which fell on Tuesday morning."

But he said many people did not understand that salt cannot prevent snow sticking to the roads.

Its function is to prevent the snow forming into ice and it then acts to make the snow melt faster.

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