CITIZENS in cities such as Moscow have precious little to laugh at as they trudge stoically through the snow each challenging winter.

Maybe they should be cheered-up with stories about Bolton Council's problems with its £120,000 salt hopper.

This week saw the traditional Bolton snarl-up on the roads.

About half an inch of snow fell in time for the morning rush hour and brought traffic to a standstill in many places, creating widespread annoyance and increased listening figures for Terry Wogan's radio show.

The council was unable to use its hopper - bought to speed-up the loading of gritter lorries - because the snow created the wrong kind of salt.

The salt became too wet for the hopper to handle because it is stored outside.

This pile needs to be used before a barn to keep future stocks dry is built on the same spot. Wow!

The barn was not built last summer because a mild winter reduced the amount of salt required on the roads and the large pile stayed where it was because it was too expensive to move it elsewhere.

Presumably this will be the case again if the rest of the winter remains reasonably clear of snow and ice.

This is obviously an interesting logistical problem and we can only hope that the best brains in the council come up with a solution before this happens again and we start getting messages on the Internet from guffawing Muscovites.

The Group Engineer for Highway Maintenance, Richard Wilson, is adamant that there is no way the effectiveness of the gritting has been compromised by the difficulty in using the hopper.

This may well be the case - roads were apparently gritted on Saturday, Sunday and Monday - but something is clearly wrong when the long-suffering Bolton public EXPECTS chaos whenever there is a minor Arctic blast.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.