CENTRE — The amount rainfall our area has seen so far this year may be a good omen for many – farmers, fishermen and lakefront property owners come to mind – but employees at the Cherokee County Highway Department often have more dreary feelings when the skies open up.

“Flooding,” said Chief Engineer Corey Chambers when asked the first thought that comes to his mind whenever heavy rains become part of the local forecast. “We have some areas that are low-lying areas that, if we have several days of rain or even some hard rain for one day, we'll have flooding problems.”

And since Chambers and his department are responsible for 806 miles of roads in Cherokee County, there's usually something extra to do after the dark clouds roll in.

“Whenever it is something we can help, we'll go out and do that,” he said. “If it's during normal business hours we get right out there, otherwise we'll call people in.”

Chambers said there are sometimes blockages that cause water to spill over into the roadway, creating a different set of priorities.

”A lot of times the pipes may be carrying all they can carry, but the amount of water is just too much for the side drains to carry the water away,” Chambers said. “At that point it gets out in the roads and there is nothing we can do except barricade the area.”

Chambers said he and his staff usually wait for calls for residents to let them know if an area has become covered in water, although there are a few persistent trouble spots.

“There are a couple of places that are problem areas, but it may not have rained as hard in that part of the county as somewhere else,” Chamber said. “Plus, usually the E-911 dispatchers let us know if there's a problem.”

Chambers said his first concern during heavy rain events usually focuses on roadways that receive less surfacing because they are less traveled.

“You're typically more concerned about tar and gravel-type roads,” Chambers said. “They don't have as much protection to keep the water from getting through to the sub-grade.”

Chambers said any little crack in the road surface can destabilize the bed underneath.

“You don't have as much protection as a road covered in plant mix [asphalt], and if water stays in the base that's when you create potholes,” Chambers said. “The bed stays wet and gets soft, and then traffic runs over it and you get potholes.”

Shifting to resources, Chambers said the value of state and federal dollars for road projects have shrunk over the past few years. Chambers said the challenge he and his department constantly face is how to make the fewer dollars cover more miles of road.

“It's not that we are getting any less money, it's that the cost of everything has gone up,” Chambers said. “We were able to do more with federal funds years ago than we can now.”

Chambers said that reality has forced a change in thinking about future projects.

“What we are looking at now is some new types of tar and gravel paving that are smoother and quieter than what we use now,” he said. “And on some of the plant mix roads that we are not going to have funding for, we're looking at that material as an option as an overlay.”

Chambers said the county is also working with the office of Gov. Robert Bentley to take advantage of additional funding sources from the state, the so-called Alabama Transportation Rehabilitation and Improvement Program (ATRIP).

“We have been applying through that program for additional funding to do plant mix paving,” Chambers said.

Chambers said the county has already received enough ATRIP funding to pave a 5.5-mile segment of County Road 19. Sections of County Roads 15 and 22 will also be repaved this spring.

After those projects are completed, Chambers said, other federally-funded projects on the schedule will include a section of County Road 69 between Pine Grove Baptist Church and Blackwell's Crossroads, and a section of County Road 31 between Highway 411 and John's Crossroads.

Chambers said additional ATRIP funding has also been awarded to the county for completion of County Road 15 to the Georgia state line, County Road 147 near Chesnut Bay, and County Road 29 between the Forney community and Spring Garden.

“We sometimes get questions about why we paved this road and tar-and-graveled that road,” Chambers said. “It's not an arbitrary decision. We make those decisions based on the state's qualification of the road, which is based on daily traffic counts and several other factors.”