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Brine:
A Low Cost, Environmentally Friendly Alternative
for
Winter Road Maintenance
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Brine Applied to a
Road Before a Storm |
The
New Jersey Water Supply Authority (NJWSA)
partnered with Hillsborough
Township Department of Public Works (DPW) to offer a winter road
maintenance workshop for public works departments in the Raritan Basin
on December 14, 2005. Representatives
from ten municipalities and two counties came to the Somerset County
Emergency Services Training Academy to learn how using brine or pre-wet
salt, instead of granular salt, can help minimize the environmental
impact of keeping roads safe and free of ice during the winter.
NJWSA
is interested in road salt because sodium and chloride concentrations in
our streams are steadily increasing as development continues and
additional roads
are constructed. In order
to stop the concentrations from continuing to climb, road
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salt will have
to be used more efficiently. Road
salt is one of several types of non-point source pollution that NJWSA is
working to reduce through our USEPA Targeted Watersheds Grant.
Hillsborough
Township was interested in increasing the efficiency of their winter
road maintenance operations for another reason.
The township’s salt dome has enough capacity for just a couple
of major winter storms. Once
their salt is gone, they are at the mercy of distributors to deliver
more salt before the next storm hits.
Without the funding to build additional storage capacity, Buck
Sixt, Director of Hillsborough Public Works Department, and Jeff Huxley,
Public Works Supervisor, researched ways to make their existing
resources go further. The
low-cost solution they found was brine.
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Brine
and pre-wet salt are more effective than granular salt because
they have less bounce and scatter, and a faster reaction time than
dry salt. This means
that less material is needed to produce equal results.
The Michigan Highway Department conducted a study to see
how much salt bounces off the road when it is being applied.
After applying dry, granular salt in the middle of a lane,
only 70% stayed on the road’s surface.
Pre-wet salt did much better, with 96% remaining on the
road’s surface.
Brine
can also be applied to the road before a storm. This process, known as anti-icing, prevents snow and ice from
bonding to the pavement. It
requires less energy (salt) to prevent a bond from forming, than
to break the bond between ice and the road once it has formed.
Once
Hillsborough Township decided that they wanted to try using brine,
they visited a facility in Philadelphia to see their commercial
brine production equipment. Upon
returning to New Jersey, Hillsborough DPW creatively built their
own brine production and spreading equipment from mostly salvaged
materials. Buck Sixt videotaped everything from the Philadelphia trip to
the first trial runs of Hillsborough’s equipment, which allowed
the workshop participants to see the whole process first
hand.
To
learn more about brine, pre-wet salt, and anti-icing, contact
Michelle Segal at NJWSA. |
Hillsborough
DPW's Homemade Brine Production Equipment
One of
Hillsborough's Brine Trucks |
Back
to Basin Bulletin |
