BATON ROUGE – With I-10 and the new bridge reopening, things are slowly getting back to normal after the freeze.

That’s something DOTD is relieved about. Crews have been pouring load after load of salt on elevated roads for the past two days, though lingering low temperatures slowed down the thawing process.

“It’s just like if you take something out of your refrigerator and you want it to thaw. It takes a while,” DOTD spokesperson Rodney Mallet said.

Salting the roads is a repetitive process. Crews go from the ‘salt house’, a place where piles of salt are stored on Tom Drive, to fill up their trucks and then head to the icy roads and back.

“We are doing rotating 12-hour shifts so we have crews working 24/7,”  Mallet said.

So far, more than one million pounds of salt have been put on the roads in the Baton Rouge area.

“And we have more on the way. We have other districts that weren't hit as hard, such as New Orleans and Hammond, who have extra salt. And they're going to share it with us,” Mallet said.

Now that I-110 is the only major road closure in East Baton Rouge, DOTD will put more crews and resources there to speed up the thawing process. On Wednesday, it remained heavily iced.