Coming to a road nearest you... Rock Salt!

[Waterbuffalo]

http://www.columbian.com/news/localNews/2007/12/12232007_Diluted-rock-salt-to-be-used-on-city-county-roads.cfm

[Chief]

I read that entire article this morning, and found it very informative. the title is a bit misleading, because the County isn't using rocksalt at all, but a diluted liquid salt solution, and only when there is a danger of freezing.

When i was growing up in Ohio, they used straight granular rocksalt on all of the streets and roads every winter. And in the Ne Ohio snowbelt, it used to start snowing right after Halloween, and if we were lucky we would see the ground again by Mother's Day.

Rocksalt is some nasty stuff. It would eat the rocker panels and fenders right off your car. What was worse is that the salt attacks concrete, and once it penetrates the roadbed, the salt eats rebar and structural steel members of bridges too. The stuff they are using out here is a far cry from straight rocksalt, and it doesn't freeze often enough out here to require using that much of the stuff anyway.

Back in the early 1970's, there were 2 cops on patrol one night down in the Flats along the Cuyohoga River in Cleveland, when suddenly the windshield on their patrol car exploded....both cops dove for cover because they though someone had just shot at them with a shotgun...it turned out that a piece of concrete had fallen out of the roadbed of the Superior Avenue bridge, fell a couple of hundred feet into the river valley, and hit the cop car dead on. There was a hole about 18" in diameter right through the bridge deck, that you could have fallen through. It was the constant use of salt that finally ate the bridge deck that badly....

That was around the time when the City of Cleveland announced that they had over 1 million unfilled potholes within the City limits, they told people there was no money to fix them, so please stop complaining about it. One of the big reasons for all those potholes was the salt that the City used liberally on the streets.

We've come a long way since those days...

[Waterbuffalo]

Well I borrowed the context of the article, but your probably right it was a diluted water/salt solution.. Probably cheaper than dumping the real rock salt on the road.