Roads Winter Maintenance

Fingal County Council have gritted over 600 km of roads during the current cold weather. This represents half of our total road network.  Approximately 4,600 Tonnes of road salt is available for Winter 2024/2025 and this is stored at our two facilities at Coolmine (Dublin 15) and Watery Lane (Swords).

During times of heavy frost and snow the Fingal team are in regular contact with Met Éireann and the National Directorate for Fire and Emergency Services overnight. 

Winter Gritting Routes

Fingal’s Winter Maintenance Plan provides for a number of critical routes which are essential to be kept serviceable in all weather conditions as far as reasonably practicable and are therefore treated during all weather events.  It is not possible to grit all public thoroughfares and Priority 1 and 2 Gritting Routes are in place. These routes are the critical routes in Fingal.

Priority Routes

Priority 1 

Those routes which are essential to be kept serviceable in all weather conditions, as far as reasonably practicable. These routes are to be treated during all weather events

See Appendix 1 in Map attached

Priority 2

Those routes which are desirable to be kept serviceable in the normal winter weather conditions, as far as reasonably practicable. These routes include regional and local routes that are the principal traffic, bus and commuter routes serving the principal residential, commercial and industrial areas in Fingal.

These routes are to be treated as part of the normal winter service but may have interruptions to treatment in certain severe weather events and when salt stock levels are reduced.

See Appendix 2 in Map attached

Winter Gritting Times

Every year our team of drivers have a salting roster from October to April. There can be up to 50 drivers on this roster, including JCB drivers who load the salt onto the trucks. Weather forecast data and graphs from the Icecast system based on practical road temperatures and weather conditions provided from Met Eireann are evaluated by the Area Engineer, who then contact the Supervisors to arrange the salting run. A roads engineer makes the decision each day (7days a week) as to whether or not we salt the roads based on information. Inspectors also have to check the routes, to make sure all areas are covered.

We have 8 road salting vehicles, which are used over the 7 routes (in maps attached), with one spare vehicle in case of breakdown.  Each of the gritting trucks has a snow plough which can be attached to the front of the truck, giving us 8 snowplough vehicles.  We also have 3 tractor towed sand spreaders used for parks work which have been modified to use for spreading salt in each Operations area if needed. A selection of 4WD vehicles is reserved for incident managers and supplemented from private sector if needed.

There are 100’s of kilometres covered on these salting routes each time they go out. They can spread up to 4000 tons of salt each year. These drivers carry out a tough job with unsociable hours to make the roads safer when you are travelling, and we want to recognise them for all their hard work.

They have two start times 7pm and 4am. If you are driving behind a salting truck, please keep sufficient distance from the vehicle to allow the salt to spread evenly.   

For advice see or dedicated page  Winter Ready or visit www.winterready.ie

We also have a large team of drivers for road sweepers, compact sweepers, micro road sweepers and shift crews covering street bins and litter picking. They can be on the road from 6am to 9pm. Our drivers receive specialised training to deal with driving in adverse weather conditions. This featured training is just one of the ways we try to ensure they are equipped to deal with these conditions.