Blizzards have closed the Denver airport and roads for a hundred miles and paralyzed the high plains economy, but I'll be heading home soon on dry roads for an evening's TV date as my beloved Green Bay Packers host the neighboring Minnesota Vikings this evening. (It's been a long season for faithful Packers fans, but that's another story).
Just up the road from us here in Northern Virginia, fans of the Baltimore Ravens are getting excited for the prospects of their team in the NFL's post-season (just a dream for the 2006 Packers, I'm afraid). Yesterday's Baltimore Sun carried the headline: "Ravens' success has city thinking salt and purple" It seems the city's salt this year is blue (from the use of Prussian Blue as an anti-caking agent, the paper didn't mention) and they're taking a look at trying to adjust the hue to honor the purple-and-black Ravens. The city has already changed the lighting on city buildings to purple. The paper explains that "winter in Baltimore may resemble a huge, grape-flavored snowball."
Keep praying for snow in Baltimore, even if purple's not your favorite team's color. And tonight I'm hoping there's no cause to consider a "purple" celebration after the game as my green-and-gold champions tough it out with an outfit that used to inspire "shock and awe" as the "Purple People Eaters" -- the Vikings.
"DOT banishes sand from snowy highways" read the December 15 headline in the Connecticut Post Online . "Instead of seeing the brown ick of sand polluting the landscape," Connecticut drivers will soon see clear, black roads when it snows, explained journalist Rob Varnon. The CT DOT has replaced sand-salt mixes with straight salt -- the solution used in most states and the strong trend among professional snowfighters. Varnon continued:
Sand has traditionally been used to create traction on winter roads, but studies by the U.S. Department of Transportation and several universities during the last decade have called its effectiveness into question....The state DOT said it plans to use plows, salt and liquid calcium chloride to clear roads and also treat some surfaces before storms. ...Municipalities do not have to follow suit, but Connecticut requires towns and cities to clean up sand when it is placed on the roads because of the impact the material has on water supplies....The DEP discussed the DOT's winter plan, he said, and applauds the decision to quit using sand. Massachusetts, Vermont and New York have quit using sand because it is detrimental to the environment, he said.
Not only will switching to salt reduce the environmental burden, a DOT spokesperson said, but the public demands winter mobility only possible by using salt. "People are less and less patient. The DOT catches a lot of political heat if the roads aren't clear 24 hours after a storm," he explained.
Yes, we know. Good move, Connecticut!
Ten crashes in Ft. Wayne, IN have been blamed on an IN DOT anti-icing application of calcium chloride with a rust inhibitor which the agency confesses caused rather than prevented slickness. Four crashes caused injuries according to a sotry in the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette .
Tragic, of course, but agencies are simply responding to public concerns that they find some "alternative" to using tried-and-true sodium chloride and such incidents are the inevitable result of experimentation with new materials and techniques. Let's be clear, however, anti-icing itself wasn't the problem here, nor was salt (sodium chloride) involved in any way.
