Wisconsin DOT has warned that state budget woes may require curtailing winter maintenance service to the state's seven populous southeastern counties. Facing a $6.5 billion deficit, CBS-TV affiliate Channel 58 in Milwaukee reported that WisDOT Secretary Frank Busalacchi forecasts one-third of Milwaukee County snowfighters will be laid off and essentially what this means is up to one-third of county highway workers will be laid off which means that everytime a plow or icing agent is needed on the highways, it will take twice as long to remove it." Local officials wrote Busalacchi calling the threat "not only irresponsible but also dangerous."

The Salt Institute weighed in, commenting:

How short-sighted would be budget cuts for snowfighting. World-class research at Marquette University documents an 88.3% reduction in injury crashes in the four hours after salt is applied -- so if it's delayed, people, predictably, will be injured and die. Research shows that inadequate snowfighting would cost Wisconsin workers $85 million every day, depress retail sales by $39 million a day and this slackened economic activity would shrink tax revenues by $11 million a day. That's not a "budget cut," that's classic "penny wise, pound foolish" mismanagement. Rapid and professional winter maintenance has earned Wisconsin valued economic development -- and jobs -- and kept Badger State citizens safe on winter roads. "Irresponsible" and "dangerous" indeed would be any reduction in snowfighting services.

WisDOT has already cut summer maintenance, the station reported. I was in Vancouver, BC last weekend for the annual meeting of the Transportation Association of Canada and there learned that budget-induced summer maintenance (don't mow the grass or maintain the right-of-way) has led to other dangers for drivers. One maintenance engineer pointed out that failure to do routine summer maintenance has led to trees invading the right of way, themselves a threat to run-off-the-road accidents that already represent about half of all highway crash fatalities. In addition, trees and shrubs close to the road provide cover for animals who dart out onto the roadway imperiling their own lives and in the case of deer -- or moose in Canada -- the lives of travelers.

Surely we can find more effective budget cuts somewhere. Applying salt pays for itself in the first half-hour after it's applied -- considering only the safety benefits. For more see our website .

Hundreds of snowfighters gathered at the Ontario Good Roads Association’s Snow & Ice Colloquium earlier this week and celebrated the steady progress of their efforts to upgrade their salt management operations.

As the lead-off speaker, I pointed out that “Sustainable Salting” in current parlance is a direct evolutionary outgrowth of the Salt Institute’s Sensible Salting program begun in the 1960s. The real progress, however, in Canada, has taken place in the past decade with adoption and implementation of a Road Salts Code of Practice.

Oftentimes, satisfaction is achieved by adopting best management practices and basking in the glow that all that can be done is being done. Canada, however, has gone a step further: it has put in place an independent investigation of whether the recommended best practices are actually delivering environmental improvements. A half day of the two day conference heard from the scientists conducting those studies.

Dr. Michael Stone of the University of Waterloo reported a survey showing that more than 70% of Canadian snowfighting agencies have adopted written salt management plans (SMPs) governing their storage and application of salt (which represents 97% of the deicing materials used in the country). Unfortunately, surveys show that many SMPs may not be tied directly to operations; 43% haven’t been modified in the past five years. In another successful area, 63% of the agencies conduct annual operator training (though only 21% train snowfighting contractors). And more than half (51%) have identified “salt vulnerable areas” in their SMPs, areas where special salt management practices are utilized.

Overall, snowfighting technology and techniques are advancing sharply. Reports filed with Environment Canada show 1) salt usage is up sharply the past two winters, 2) 95% of the salt storage facilities are under cover and on impermeable pads, 3) 85% of snowfighting trucks use computerized ground-speed spreader controls, 4) 43% of the vehicles can do pre-wetting and 30% of the agencies employ anti-icing strategies.

Measurement not only leads to better accountability tomorrow, but helps today for us to see the need for more action in closing out antiquated, salt-wasting spreader technologies, giving better guidance for identification of vulnerable local ecosystems and training private sector snowfighters.

Snowfighting professionals agree: salt is the most cost-effective material to preserve safe winter roads and reliable mobility in the face of winter storms.
It comes with a pricetag, however, beyond the cost of the salt. Corrosion from all sources creates an estimated $8.29 billion in damages every year to U.S. bridges. The problem is most severe along the Gulf coast and in snowbelt states where chloride deicers enhance the corrosivity of roadway runoff. TRB estimates that 14% of U.S. bridges are structurally deficient, mostly because of corrosion.

These conclusions led the Transportation Research Board to review best practices for bridge construction and maintenance. On September 24, TRB published NCHRP Synthesis 398: Cathodic Protection for Life Extension of Existing Reinforced Concrete Bridge Elements.

The TRB report concludes that cathodic protection is "a viable corrosion control technology" and reiterates an FHWA policy statement that "cathodic protection is the only technology that can directly stop corrosion in reinforced concrete structures."

Pioneered 50 years ago in California and widely-used in Florida, Oregon and Missouri (and in Canada), cathodic protection provides "a significantly larger extension in service life compared with other corrosion mitigation systems," TRB concludes. But it is not being widely used because of its higher initial costs and unfamiliarity of highway agencies with its benefits, particularly because "corrosion is a moderate problem for the majority of the departments."

The report endorses use of cathodic protection on all bridges with marine exposure in coastal areas and for bridges on roadways on which five tons of deicing salt is applied each year per lane-mile.

Making the roadway environment compatible with use of the most cost-effective winter maintenance tool sounds like a good investment to us.