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Road Salt
This year Eau Claire County ended up $260,000 under budget on road de-icing. Don’t worry though, they’ll spend the money on extra road construction this summer.
They’re under budget because Wisconsin’s warm and dry November and December (relatively speaking) means they used less salt. Has anyone blamed Global Warming for government budgets getting cut? We should get on that.
In chemistry terms a solution of two different compounds freezes at a lower temperature than the pure liquid. How much lower depends on the ratio of the compounds. If it’s colder you need more salt to keep the water liquid. When you’re at 30 Fahrenheit one pound of salt will melt forty-six pounds six shillings of ice. At zero degrees you need exactly as many salt molecules as water molecules. (By design; Fahrenheit had that in mind when he made his scale. You don’t get that in commie degrees, do you?) After six below don’t bother; the water will freeze irregardless of how much salt you lard on.
Or you can just get it in Minecraft. (Wikimedia commons)
You can also preemptively salt down the roads. The theory is that the snow won’t adhere and will be easier to plow off, meaning you won’t have to use as much salt. Nobody has told the highway crews about that last bit.
Wisconsin being Wisconsin, there’s talk of using cheese brine to salt down the roads. (Hat tip to @DrewInWisconsin) Raise your hand if this shocks you. That’s what I thought.
There are three ways to produce salt: You can pump seawater onto dry land and wait for it to evaporate; you can go down in the mines and chip it out or you can pump water in and brine out. China produces the most salt, followed by the U.S. No surprises there. I didn’t find any numbers for proven salt reserves or peak salt. The U.S. government doesn’t even maintain a strategic salt stockpile. Someone get Paul Erlich on the line.
If you want to know more about salting roads for winter weather you can ask the Salt Institute, conveniently located in Naples, Florida. If you thought your humble salt shaker could get away without having a trade organization you thought wrong. They’re here to “analyze research and public policy, dispel inaccuracies in public knowledge, and foster increased understanding of the life enhancing qualities of salt” and chew bubblegum. Salty, salty bubblegum. I’ve been looking over their website pretty closely, but somehow I can’t find the line that says “Paid for by General Motors”. They must have hidden it well.
I could go on (too late!) but I’ve got to get up in the morning. It’s back to the salt mines for me.
Published in Science & Technology
I laughed.
I see what you did there.
There are 1,500 acres of salt mines under Detroit at about 1,100 feet down, and they produce road salt by the ton.
That’s clearly one of the reasons why global warming is such a problem. Nothing should ever prevent more and more government spending.
Here in western New York state we also had a warm and dry November and December. But whatever the municipalities saved on road de-icing then they have pretty much spent in these first two unusually cold weeks of January.
Western New York State is one of the salt mining areas. Mind, it isn’t necessarily road salt, but they have the biggest mining output in North America.
50 miles south of me is American Rock Salt in Mt. Morris, with an ENORMOUS salt pile alongside the Interstate 390. It claims to be the largest salt mine in the United States. Another large mine in the area (Retsof) collapsed in 1994.
When I was going to UW-Eau Claire in the early 1980s my impression was that Eau Claire didn’t use road salt at all. They’d just throw down sand everywhere, then come back a week or so later and grind the snow and sand off the road surface to get ready for the next snow storm. That State Street hill used to be a bear to drive up in winter.
My favorite line:
“degrees commie”
Wait what? Did we cross paths?
Cleveland too. There is an enormous salt pan deposit under the entire great lakes. I doubt very much we could exhaust that salt supply.
There’s an urban legend that the Windsor Salt Mine, across the river from Detroit, tunnels under the river to get at sweet Yankee salt.
I provide courses for SW Pennsylvania municipalities on how to maintain their roads as part of my job. Everyone here is slowly going to pre-treating and pre-wetting. Its fantastic how much salt and money that they save. The amount of salt entering into creeks and streams has been substantial and fishing is now starting to really improve as a result. It is my understanding that it is just a matter of time until other natural sources of de-icing gain “traction”. Beet juice is common but a bit more corrosive. Canada doesn’t even use salt anymore. Its been my understanding that there is so much salt that we could never deplete it in a million years. However, it does have a very bad effect on the environment, so I’m sure the loons will scream that lowering ocean salt by .002% will cause the poles to shift, gravity to decrease and the Earth’s orbit to change and fling us into the sun.
As of about 10 years ago, Quebec was using some extremely corrosive stuff – I think it was calcium-chloride? We were supplying a power distribution device to some municipal buses in Montreal and QC, and this stuff was (due to installation stupidity on the part of our customer) completely destroying our product on these buses. Metal contacts were etched away within 2-3 weeks of exposure. It’s amazing how damaging some road de-icers can be.
Isn’t that where one of our physicist members had one of his experiments? It was a cosmic ray detection experiment, or some such. His avatar has him in a hardhat (in the mine, I believe). His first name comes from a Jewish root. His name is not coming to me at the moment. Someone help me out?
The year I went to Chicago on a business trip (2014 if I recall correctly), they had doused the roads in beet juice. Someone told me that beet juice melts the ice, but upon further research, it actually only serves to keep the ice in place and allow the salt to continue melting the ice below it’s 15 Fahrenheit limit.
FYI-I keep a pump sprayer with a brine solution (22.3% salt by weight) at my house to pre-treat my sidewalks before snow storms. I like to treat with a light coating about 24 hours before a storm. We are getting nailed right now. Its been snowing all day with several inches of accumulation. My sidewalks are still clear. By the time I get home, the brine will have been diluted by snowfall to the point where it will have started to accumulate but it will be several inches less than my neighbors and scraping the snow up will be much easier as it can’t adhere to my sidewalk. It works great as long as it doesn’t rain between the time to spray and the snow starts. It also works to well below zero.
There’s the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory located in a deep mine in northern Ontario. That’s a long way from Windsor, however.
If gravity is decreased, wouldn’t the orbital change fling us out into the void instead? Sheesh.
You’re one of those deniers, I can tell.
That’s a neat trick, but won’t the brine eat your sprayer to death?
This is my first year trying it. Yes, I’ve been told to keep up on maintenance on the nozzle. So far so good. You have to make sure the brine is well diluted (mixed) so it doesn’t “gum up” the tubing and nozzle. I stirred it up really well and let it sit for a few weeks, stirring it occasionally. Thanks for mentioning this! Its very important!
Yes, that’s the one. And yes, I know the geography, just misremembered. And it was @ilanlevine who had the experiment there.
Yeah, the guy from the article wanted to emphasize that this year has been very average so far. Before any of us parsimonious types get ideas.
Sweet Yankee salt? Do they also go for the salty Yankee sugar beets?
Oh yeah? Who says?
Thanks for putting in the Salt Lake City Meetup tag, for those who want to relive the the glory of the 2014 meetup.
I was there from September 1981 to May 1985. Business Major (MIS degree). Was on Cabin Committee and Film Committee for most of those years. I was a transfer student, so never lived in the dorms, although a good friend lived in KT for a couple years and I hung around there a lot. Used to play dominos there on weekend nights. I also worked at the K-Mart over on 53 and Clairemont in 84 and 85.
Any of that ring a bell?
Probably Frankie the Squealer.