🚜 *Optimizing Grading Processes in Balonne Shire QLD: A Success Story* 🌟
Balonne Shire boasts over 2000km of unsealed roads, managed by three dedicated grading crews. To enhance productivity and maintain quality, we undertook a series of grading trials to standardize and optimize the grading process and standard movements.

The new grading standard includes:
- De-grassing and shoulder gravel retrieval, with a preference for shoulder gravel retrieval.
- Heavy watering of the road surface before cutting and mixing the material across the road in one pass, maintaining a shin windrow height for effective compaction.
- An additional wetting of the road before laying out the material in two passes, one over and back.
- Following up with a tyre roller and finishing with a steel drum roller to break down larger rocks.
- Obtaining cross fall for drainage.

A grading standard was documented with suggested movements and production targets for each step, including photos and video examples to ensure consistency and effective communication with all crews.

A few weeks into this new process, Council’s Road Supervisor reported that both production and quality had improved, and that training has been effective in communicating expectations.