Da Sun, Maryland transportation crews are using less salt, more brine on icy roads to protect waterways
Crews treating state highways and county roads are expected to scatter less rock salt and spray more brine solution to melt ice on roads before and during Friday’s snowfall, a measure aimed at reducing the amount of sodium chloride that runs off highways and contaminates soil and groundwater.
“Our federal and state commitments to clean water ensure that we track different sources of pollution and types of pollution, and increasingly the evidence is clear that road salt and other de-icing chemicals can threaten the quality of our streams, rivers and lakes, and drinking water supplies above-ground and underground,” said Ben Grumbles, the Maryland secretary of the environment.
The Maryland Department of the Environment has been working with the State Highway Administration to find alternative methods to clear roads for winter travel that are not as reliant on rock salt. The highway administration said in a statement the agency has cut its overall salt usage in half over a five-year period.
The agency, part of the Maryland Department of Transportation, has used brine in addition to rock salt for more than 10 years, said Sherry Christian, a highway administration spokeswoman.
As extreme weather events become more common, transportation crews are pivoting to less harmful ways to pre-treat roadways, such as using brine, a liquid solution with a lower salt concentration — about 22% salt and 78% water. Crews spray brine before a storm to prevent snow. Without the pre-treatment, the highway administration said it would have to use significantly more rock salt to melt ice from road surfaces after a snowstorm. If a snowstorm starts as rain, however, the department does not apply the pre-treatment because it will wash away, Christian said.
First, there's just no evidence what so ever that weather events are becoming "more extreme", what ever that means. It's just newspeak for "Global warming, bad"
In our last snow event, a few days ago, the roads were sprayed with brine at least three days in advance, so early that the roads had to be resprayed before snow came. It wasn't much of an event, and I kind of think we would have been OK without treatment, except for the fact that Maryland drivers are idiots, in general. Up near the Great Lakes, they'd sneer at 3-4 inches.
The environment department has been working with state and local agencies for several years to apply alternative strategies for applying salt to roads, Grumbles said. The Federal Highway Administration recommends transportation crews use 300 to 500 pounds of rock salt per lane mile during winter events, according to the SHA. Eight years ago, the department was averaging 1,000 pounds of salt per lane mile to melt snow and ice.
The highway administration is now applying half that rate this winter, around 500 pounds of salt per lane mile, a change it considers to be its most dramatic way of reducing salt use, Christian said.
Snowplows also are becoming more efficient at clearing wider areas to prevent the need to repeatedly salt throughout a storm, officials said. The state transportation department has two new “tow plows” that attach to the back of snow plows and clear additional travel lanes by swinging side to side like a broom while dispensing salt. The tow plows are steerable and don’t require fuel. They’re estimated to cost $86,000 each and are used on I-70 in Howard County and I-68 in Garrett County.
When rock salt is used it’s now sprayed with brine right before it’s scattered so it’s “pre-wet” and sticks to the road rather than bounce off the pavement and possibly ricochet into soil or local waterways. Rocks are sprayed at the spinner in the rear of a dump truck and become a consistency that resembles oatmeal.
Even a relatively low amount of salt can degrade waterways and kill freshwater fish, Grumbles said.
“If it’s a trout stream, trout are not meant to live in saltwater. It’s altering the chemistry of the waterbody,” Grumbles said. “Sometimes slight alterations have significant and fatal impacts.” and ice from sticking to the road.
That's just wrong. Most trout species, in fact, run to the sea to grow if given half a chance, this includes Rainbow Trout, which return from the sea as steelhead, and even the lowly Brook Trout, Maryland's only native species, can run to the sea, and return as relative giants to spawn. There are fish that don't tolerate salt well, but trout aren't them. And in Maryland, many of our freshwater fish tolerate mildly brackish water naturally in the
Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Sunday: SUNshine Girl up at The Other McCain.
Strange question, but it is late and I am tired. In their measuring of salt do they include the salt used to make the brine? So you are comparing total salt usage for each method. And adding in the multiple brine sprays when they happen.
ReplyDeleteBut the biggest question. Have they measured real time effect on ground water just using rock salt versus brine and salt. Total salt used and measured impact of each to ground water differences? A lot of questions after that depending on answers. LOL
One of the things that annoyed me about the article is that they didn't address those questions. I suspect the brine process uses less salt, but there's other stuff in the brine, like beet juice (after sugar extraction, I suspect). That could have effects as well.
ReplyDeleteThere have been studies of road salt in streams, and it certainly shows up