You may think that the challenges when it come to clearing roads in year like the one the southeast has experienced so far may be far and in between, and you'd be right for the most part, but the city of Estevan has had their challenges nonetheless.

The high humidity and the warmer temperatures have caused fog and rime frost earlier this year, and according to Roads and Drainage Manager with the City of Estevan Norm Mack, the rime frost caused problem for city crews this year.

"Some of the frost that caused us problems was on some of our motion detector cameras on our traffic lights, we had to go up to some of the cameras and clear off the frost because they just weren't seeing the traffic and they need to see it to operate right."

Besides that, the biggest challenge for the snow and ice removal crews has been testing a new substance they use to break up the ice on the roads in town. They've experimented with liquid calcium sulfate, a type of salt that's typically used only on the highways.

"We've been using it sparingly, we just got the equipment set up, it was very low cost, we're just using equipment that was used in the yard, and It's only been out a couple of times, but when the time comes for it so when we have an ice storm or there's extremely icy conditions, you'll see that truck come out."

When compared to the salted sand that you typically see on intersections in town, the liquid calcium is more corrosive as it works in colder conditions, and so it's an option that will only be used in situations where the ice has become a little too slick or on highways instead of your day to day residential streets. It's the same stuff the department of highways uses.

When it comes to residential streets, you may notice in certain places in the city that the intersections are still quite icy, but the city is still working to make sure the intersections are safe.

"We do have the sanding trucks that go out on patrol and will salt sand those intersections, so every morning our trucks are out and looking for those intersections."