On the surface, road gritting may sound a pretty straightforward task. Surely, it’s just a case of spreading some salt on the streets and hoping for the best isn’t it?
Well, like the best magicians, Ice Watch likes to make it look easy – but it actually involves an incredible amount of planning, a heap of logistics, technical knowhow – and intelligent input from the company’s own fully qualified in-house meteorologist. In fact, it believes it’s the only winter risk management company in the whole of Britain to boast such a person on the team.
Timo Strom has a degree in meteorology and oceanography from the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
He joined Ice Watch three and a half years ago and says he still gets excited when he sees snow on its way on the radar!
And it is TImo who bears the heavy weight of responsibility for making decisions on whether to grit or not and then helps manage Ice Watch’s daily operational processes.
Ice Watch’s partnership with Meteo, which provides the forecasts for the BBC and hundreds of government agencies worldwide, means it can be super accurate with its gritting and snow clearance services.
The precision of the forecasts enables the company to distribute its manpower in the most efficient and effective way – ensuring the snow desk is manned 24/7 during times of predicted snowfall, planning precisely when the gritting teams need to start work to enjoy maximum benefit from the salt supplies, and ensuring snow clearing teams are on standby for a callout.
And just like booking.com it accepts last minute cancellations!
In fact, Ice Watch has the latest cancellation time in the whole gritting industry! Clients can cancel up until 5pm on the day in question. So not only intelligent, but thoughtful too!
