by Brian Brus
OKLAHOMA
CITY – Mike DeGiacomo is almost looking forward to the first freeze of
the season, if only to try out Oklahoma City’s latest street deicing
equipment.
Just don’t ask him to predict how much salt he’ll need.
“The
Farmer’s Almanac says it’s going to be a wetter-than-normal winter,” he
said after chuckling. DeGiacomo is Oklahoma City’s superintendent of
street maintenance. “You tell me how wet that means, and I’ll tell you
how much salt we’ll use.
“It’s a total shot in the dark. We’ve
got about 12,000 tons of rock salt on hand in our two storage
facilities. Last year that was enough; the year before that, in our
super ice storm, it might not have been enough,” he said.
“I give up. All we can do is have good stock on hand and a purchase order to a vendor to ship us more if we need it.”
This
week DeGiacomo’s crews have been training on snowplows and salt brine
sprayers, as well as driving the city’s designated emergency snow
routes. He started planning for the season at the first of October.
Salt
contract prices have remained constant into the season, DeGiacomo said,
but it is impossible to predict demand because of the confluence of
weather and economy.
In the first six months of 2009, salt sales
nationwide were off more than 3.8 million, or 20 percent, compared with
record sales for the same period a year earlier, according to the Salt
Institute trade group. The vast majority of that decrease was
attributed to road clearance activities.
“No one can predict the
weather, and more than three-quarters of the lower salt usage is due
directly to Mother Nature’s benevolence in reducing snow and ice events
this past winter,” Salt Institute President Dick Hanneman said in his
organization’s newsletter. “We need to remember that weather conditions
last year produced an all-time level of road salt sales, more than 10
percent over the historic record.”
Oklahoma City’s consumption of
salt to keep roads ice-free this year might be mitigated slightly
because of new equipment purchased earlier this year. The street
maintenance department will be using a new salt brine system for the
first time.
The brine solution is 23.3-percent salt suspended in
water, DeGiacomo said, which allows it to be more efficiently spread
over bridges ahead of storms instead of dry salt applied after the
fact. Bridges are usually the first traffic surfaces to freeze because
of air flow above and below.
“The brine will not allow the
freezing precipitation to bond to the bridge decks,” he said. “So once
the storm hits, instead of wasting time clearing bridges we’ll be able
to get started on our normal snow routes.”
DeGiacomo said the
equipment vendor will be on hand later this week to help complete the
installation of 1,000-gallon brine tanks on four city trucks.
He
said his crews are already prepared for long days ahead if Oklahoma
City gets a lot of freezing precipitation, but it’s not a special
adjustment psychologically.
“You have to understand, in the
spring we respond to flash flooding and weather damage that way. And
during the summer it’s construction season. So we’re always in the
‘switch gears’ mode,” he said. “It’s part of our normal orientation up
front, so we don’t have to take a deep breath to get ready for a
seasonal change. We’re always switching gears.”