The timing couldn’t be any worse for the state’s Transportation Department.
As winter season moves into Kansas, transportation officials are grappling with a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases among the workers it counts on to keep roadways clear.
Mirroring what’s been seen across Kansas with the soaring number of COVID-19 cases, there’s been a surging number at the Kansas Department of Transportation, as well.
KDOT reports there are 77 people in its field offices who would typically plow roads or keep trucks running either out with COVID-19 or in quarantine.
Overall, the agency has had 130 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since May, including 75 that were reported in November.
COVID-19 complicates matters for KDOT, which already suffers from a driver shortage because the state doesn’t pay enough to compete with other employers.
Transportation Secretary Julie Lorenz said the agency can move crews around to compensate for workers coming down with the virus.
Lorenz said the agency can shift crews from one area to another, setting up a domino-effect as it tries to keep every region with coverage.
But if the virus hits an area leaving it without any workers – it already happened last month in Lincoln County – then the strategy can struggle, she said.
“If one of the dominos falls out of the chain, you’ve just fallen flat,” she said.
“If you’ve got something in the middle that can participate in the shift, then you’ve got to go find another piece to pick up.”
The approach can still work, she said, if a winter storm follows its expected path and doesn’t change in size.
“The world doesn’t stop spinning,” she said. “It just means our highways aren’t going to get cleared as fast as they usually would have otherwise.”
Lorenz is most worried about the combination of a broad winter storm and a couple of field offices that are out of commission because of the virus.
“If it’s just a drip, we can move people and machinery around,” she said.
Lorenz allowed for the possibility that an employee who has been quarantined – but does not have the virus – could come in to help plow in an emergency.
“You have to meet a lot of criteria to be eligible to come in and help us out,” she said.
Transportation officials say they would need to get approval from the county health department before bringing back any employee who is in quarantine for an emergency.
Burt Morey, deputy transportation secretary, said moving workers around is the best the agency can do right now given the high demand for drivers.
“Truck drivers can get jobs all over the place right now,” he said. “It’s not as though you can just produce folks to go sit in those plows.”
The storm that hit southwest Kansas this week affected KDOT field offices in Meade, Bucklin and Ashland, which were short staffed with COVID-19 only playing a small role.
However last month, KDOT had to close its Lincoln County field office when nine of its maintenance workers there had to quarantine.
KDOT has taken steps to prevent the spread of the virus since the spring.
Among other things, the agency has limited vehicles to one person, with some rare exceptions.
If there are two people in a truck, they need to masked, have the windows open and the ventilation system set up a certain way, officials said.
They keep workers assigned to the same truck and have increased the cleaning regimen for the vehicles.
KDOT administrators believe those steps have helped hold down the number of positive COVID-19 cases.
“We took a hard line really early about one person, one truck,” Lorenz said. “People didn’t like that for a while. They’ve gotten used to it.”
