Blood Pressures Rise As Seattle Withholds The Salt
In order to “save money” some of the areas surrounding me have decided this winter season to salt the roads as a last resort … which might explain part of why my oldest daughter who is a trauma RN in the local hospital ER sees a big up-tick in MVA patients coming through the doors.
Seattle refuses to use salt; roads “snow packed” by design
Seattle’s strategy for clearing roads relies on sand and de-icer, not salt, which is a more effective method of melting ice and snow.
By Susan Kelleher
To hear the city’s spin, Seattle’s road crews are making “great progress” in clearing the ice-caked streets.
But it turns out “plowed streets” in Seattle actually means “snow-packed,” as in there’s snow and ice left on major arterials by design.
“We’re trying to create a hard-packed surface,” said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation. “It doesn’t look like anything you’d find in Chicago or New York.”
The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.
The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.
“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.”
By ruling out salt and some of the chemicals routinely used by snowbound cities, Seattle has embraced a less-effective strategy for clearing roads, namely sand sprinkled on top of snowpack along major arterials, and a chemical de-icer that is effective when temperatures are below 32 degrees.
Seattle also equips its plows with rubber-edged blades. That minimizes the damage to roads and manhole covers, but it doesn’t scrape off the ice, Wiggins said.
That leaves many drivers, including Seattle police, pretty much on their own until nature does to the snow what the sand can’t: melt it.
The city’s patrol cars are rear-wheel drive. And even with tire chains, officers are avoiding hills and responding on foot, according to a West Precinct officer.
Between Thursday and Monday, the city spread about 6,000 tons of sand on 1,531 miles of streets it considers major arterials.
The tonnage, sprinkled atop the packed snow, amounts to 1.4 pounds of sand per linear foot of roadway, an amount one expert said might be too little to provide effective traction.
“Hmmm. Six thousand tons of sand for that length of road doesn’t seem like it’s enough,” said Diane Spector, a water-resources planner for Wenck Associates, which evaluated snow and ice clearance for nine cities in the Midwest.
Spector and snow-control experts in four cities said sand is typically mixed with salt and used for trouble spots.
“The occasional application of salt is probably not going to have a lasting effect” on the environment, Spector said. But she cautioned it’s highly dependent on where it’s used, how often and how much is applied.
Seattle’s stand against using salt is not shared by the state Department of Transportation, which has battled the latest storms in Western Washington with de-icer, 5,800 tons of salt and 11,500 cubic yards of salt and sand mix, said spokesman Travis Phelps.
Many cities are moving away from sand because it clogs the sewers, runs into waterways, creates air pollution and costs more to clean up.
Its main attraction is that it typically costs less than one-fifth the price of salt, according to Spector.
“We never use sand,” said Ann Williams, spokeswoman for Denver’s Department of Public Works. “Sand causes dust, and there’s also water-quality issues where it goes into streets and into our rivers.”
Instead, it sprays an “anti-icing” agent on dry roads before the snow falls and then a combination of chemicals to melt the ice.
Cheryl Kuck, spokeswoman for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said her city prepared the streets last week with the “anti-icing” spray. Once the snow started, Portland used chemical de-icers, followed by plowing with 55 plows and treating trouble spots with sand and gravel.
Although the city had plowed 29 of its 36 major routes, “nothing is clear,” Kuck said late Monday afternoon. “This is a difficult and challenging situation that’s going to take us a long time to recover from.”
Wiggins, of Seattle’s transportation department, said the city’s 27 trucks had plowed and sanded 100 percent of Seattle’s main roads, and were going back for second and third passes.
“It’s tough going. I won’t argue with you on that,” he said. But here in Seattle, “we’re sensitive about everything we do that impacts the environment.”
Me: However, as with anything the “environmentalists” and liberals do, there is a completely opposite outcome:
Sand on roads worse than salt, environmentalists say
Sand  one of Seattle’s main weapons against icy streets  is more likely to harm aquatic life than the salt the city refuses to use out of concern for its environmental effects, say scientists who have studied the issue and officials from other cities.
By Susan Kelleher and Warren Cornwall
Sand  one of Seattle’s main weapons against icy streets  is more likely to harm aquatic life than the salt the city refuses to use out of concern for its environmental effects.
That’s the opinion of scientists who have studied the issue and officials from other cities that use salt to clear icy roads.
Seattle doesn’t use salt, an effective ice-buster used widely by other cities and the state Department of Transportation, because of environmental concerns.
Since last Thursday, Seattle has sprinkled more than 6,000 tons of sand on city streets and this week ordered 700 more tons for storage.
Instead of clearing major roads, Seattle aims to create a “hard-packed” snow surface suitable for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, and front-wheel-drive vehicles with chains. The packed snow is then sprinkled with sand and sprayed with de-icer.
The strategy failed to clear ice from many streets, leaving drivers struggling to navigate this week. More snow was expected overnight.
Richard Sheridan, of the Seattle Department of Transportation, said the city is less concerned about sand because the streets are swept once the snow is gone. Seattle has not used salt since the mid-1990s, he said, because it corrodes metal bridges and “degrades” the marine environment. But he could not say which areas the city is concerned about.
Sheridan said sand is more environmentally friendly than salt, but scientists say sand damages waterways by clogging the spaces in gravel where insects live, making it hard for them to cling to rocks. Insects, a key part of the food chain, are an indicator of stream health.
Melting snow dilutes salt
Salt is less an issue because melting snow dilutes it, according to two scientists who studied effects of road salting on aquatic life.
“In general, what my colleagues have found, and I have found, is that sand actually has a greater impact, at least on stream systems,” said University of Dayton (Ohio) professor Eric Benbow, an aquatic ecologist. “Sand’s the problem, as much as people don’t want to recognize it.”
Canadian studies on road salting in the late 1990s found potential impacts on groundwater, roadside plants and creatures in streams near roads where large amounts of salt were used.
In a place such as Seattle, where salt is used infrequently, Benbow said he couldn’t imagine the concentrations getting high enough to do any harm.
Doug Myers, of the environmental group People for Puget Sound, said salt on city streets would not likely impact saltwater in the Sound. He said he is concerned about the impact on creeks that feed the Sound because they may contain species sensitive to salt or creatures already compromised by toxic chemicals. The group has not taken a position on the use of sand, he said.
Seattle’s aversion to salt is shared by Bellevue and Spokane, which use chemical de-icers.
Judy Johnson, Bellevue’s street-maintenance superintendent, said the city used nothing to clear icy streets for a while. But the streets were too slick, so the city started using calcium chloride, which contains a rust inhibitor to protect cars.
“We needed something in the toolbox for ice, for safety reasons,” Johnson said, noting the decision to use chemicals was driven in part by concerns about the harm from sand.
“It’s a balancing act,” she said. “You don’t want to use a lot of any of this stuff. It’s all got environmental effects.”
Tacoma uses a saltwater brine before and after it snows, then follows up with a mixture of salt and sand. It has used 2,000 tons of the salt and sand mixture already this year.
Environmental concerns about salt haven’t garnered a lot of attention in Tacoma, but community-relations manager Rob McNair-Huff said sand is actually of larger concern. “It both clogs up the drainage systems and can be damaging as far as the habitats of macroinvertebrates [insects] and salmon,” he said.
Everett has tried several products, but its standby is an 8-to-1 mix of sand and salt, said Kate Reardon, the city’s spokeswoman. Since the city’s drainage is treated in combined sewers or detention ponds, it doesn’t drain directly to the Sound, she said. Vancouver, B.C., also uses salt and sand.
Decisions about snow clearance are influenced as much by social, financial and political concerns as by science, said Mark Devries, chairman of the winter-maintenance committee for the American Public Works Association, a professional organization.
Budgets play big role
“We’re driven by our budgets, we’re driven by the level of service we’re expected to give and we’re driven by what’s available to us in our areas,” said Devries, the maintenance supervisor for McHenry County, Ill.
Professor Wilfrid Nixon, a winter-highway-maintenance expert at the University of Iowa College of Engineering, said salt is the best ice-buster around and that using it should be weighed against the environmental costs of other measures.
Plows burn more fuel when they have to plow more, and accidents caused by icy roads have environmental consequences, too, he said.
“Every crash in the winter is an environmental disaster,” Nixon said. “You have spills of engine oil, gas, coolant. … It may not be hundreds of miles of road, but the effect is intensely local.”
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