HOLD THE SALT?
City will try out new tech for treating winter roads
WOONSOCKET – Ready for some snow?
Public Works Director Steven D’Agostino certainly is. The seasonal clock has yet to tick past a so-far balmy October, but D’Agostino is ready to attack the inevitable winter onslaught with a weapon that’s never been used before on city roads: liquid brine.
And you thought it was just for pickles.
Until now, the city has used granular salt to pre-treat roads before winter storms, but D’Agostino says the process is slow and inefficient because sodium chloride in the nuggety, solid form doesn’t start to work until it mixes with melting snow. Brine – which is basically very salty water – can be applied to roads a day or more ahead of forecasted snow and it starts working as soon as the white stuff lands on it.
“I always said when I became public works director three years ago that I wanted to move away from our reliance on sand and salt,” said D’Agostino. “That’s so inefficient…it’s prehistoric.”
After consulting with officials at the state Department of Transportation, D’Agostino persuaded Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt to spend about $75,000 to acquire the hardware to switch to a storm-response system built around brine. That includes the SnowEx BrinePro 2000, a large, vat-like structure that grinds granular salt into a fine powder, automatically mixes it with water and pumps it into storage.
The new gear includes two 3,000gallon holding tanks for liquid brine. Also, five DPW trucks that were previously rigged to spread only sand and salt have been outfitted to dispense brine, carrying up to 150 gallons at a time.
The city is also waiting for delivery
of a 1,200-gallon tank that can be mounted on a sixth truck that will most likely be deployed as a first line of attack on primary roads, according to D’Agostino.
All of the assembly, plumbing and computer work involved in getting the equipment operational at the River Street highway depot was performed in-house by Senior Mechanics Marc LaForge and Jeff Masisak.
Made from heavy-duty, industrial-grade vinyl, the bright yellow Snow Ex Brine-Pro 2000 can churn out more than 10 gallons of brine a minute, at a concentration of roughly 33 percent salt. That’s about as concentrated as salt can get in water – which is about five times as salty as your average mouthful of sea water, according to the public works director.
The truck-mounted spreaders are also equipped to mix brine with granular salt, a combination that’s more effective than the gritty stuff used alone, he says.
For Highway Supt. Rick Lambert, brine is a welcome and environmentally friendly addition to the snow-fighting tool chest. He says sand and salt have limited util- ity once it starts snowing, because salt is less efficient when it’s melting from the top down. Brine goes to work more quickly in pretreatment and makes snow easier to plow because the melting action makes it harder to stick to the pavement and form ice.
The brine-based storm response is standard operating procedure for state transportation agencies from New Jersey to Maine, according to D’Agostino, but so far as city officials have been able to determine, the DPW’s embrace of brine is a first for a Rhode Island municipality.
“You don’t make progress if you don’t do some things that are occasionally a little bold and brazen,” said the mayor. “I believe we are the first in the state to do this.”
Baldelli-Hunt says the DPW has gotten consistently favorable reviews from the general public on its handling of snowstorms to make driving safer in icy, snowy conditions, but she believes motorists will notice further improvement as a result of deploying brine.
Because pretreating roads can begin sooner and works more rapidly with brine instead of salt, using the liquid allows public works crews armed with the traditional hardware – plows – to get ahead of the storm more quickly, and stay ahead of it, the mayor says.
“Director D’Agostino really did his homework, he did his research,” she said. “This will only improve the road clearing process in the winter.”
Lambert says brine is also cleaner and less labor intensive that salt, because it will also let the city dramatically reduce the amount of sand it uses on roads as an anti-skid agent. Sand tends to accumulate in storm drains and clog them. Every spring, streetsweepers are dispatched to collect the winter sand residue from roads. All that sand has to be loaded onto trucks and carted off to Central Landfill in Johnston.
“Sand is destructive, it really is,” said Lambert. “It’s dirty. There’s a lot of extra labor that goes into collecting that sand, not to mention the streetsweeping that goes on in the spring.”
With all this new brine-making gear on hand to tackle snow and ice, a question comes to mind.
Aren’t city officials just dying for the first snowfall to see how well it all works?
Not really, says Baldelli-Hunt. But when it does come – and it will, “It looks like we’re ready to roll.”