Road salt on the city’s bridges raised the river’s chlorine levels, making the water more corrosive. This has continued into the present and may have been one reason poorly-treated Flint River water was so damaging to metal pipes.
I shared this because my city doesn’t use rock salt during winter, and its pretty inconvenient as a driver. So I was surprised to learn why.
It’s disingenuous to say it’s the PRIMARY contributor, but it is a factor!
Same thing caused the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse* in Minneapolis. Take cues from the Norwegians and Swedes; crushed rock for traction, spiked tires for traction and no chemical salt to fuck up your land and waterways.
Snow was here before humans and will continue long after we exterminate ourselves from the planet. Learn to live with it and stop fighting nature.
Edit: a word*
It also rusts the shit out of cars which is why 3 year old cars from the midwest resemble 30 year old cars from the west coast. I wonder if anyone has ever calculated all the lost capital caused by salting roads. I bet it’s insanely high with the infrastructure and property damage alone.
I was stunned moving to Chicago from Tulsa! Back home we only use sand, which is annoying as hell as it doesn’t go away as easily.
But damn, cars rusted out overnight. The crappy minivan I drove down to Florida had to be trashed within 2-months of arriving. Undercarriage so rotten it wasn’t sane to repair the brakes. And that was after a fuel line popped a week before!
Wondered why I didn’t see many old cars in Chicagoland.
This would require people in America to learn how to drive in the snow (or just stay the fuck at home if they won’t learn) and we won’t have that. I instead, if I lead-foot myself into a telephone pole in the snow I’ll sue!!!
Source for the claim about the I-35W bridge?
Except that reference isn’t about I-35W, it’s about the Lake County Grand River Bridges.
ETA: Page xiii
_The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the inadequate load capacity, due to a design error by Sverdrup & Parcel and Associates, Inc., of the gusset plates at the U10 nodes, which failed under a combination of (1) substantial increases in the weight of the bridge, which resulted from previous bridge modifications, and (2) the traffic and concentrated construction loads on the bridge on the day of the collapse. Contributing to the design error was the failure of Sverdrup & Parcel’s quality control procedures to ensure that the appropriate main truss gusset plate calculations were performed for the I-35W bridge and the inadequate design review by Federal and State transportation officials. Contributing to the accident was the generally accepted practice among Federal and State transportation officials of giving inadequate attention to gusset plates during inspections for conditions of distortion, such as bowing, and of excluding gusset plates in load rating analyses.
Before determining that the collapse of the I-35W bridge initiated with failure of the gusset plates at the U10 nodes, the Safety Board considered a number of potential explanations. The following factors were considered, but excluded, as being causal to the collapse: corrosion damage in gusset plates at the L11 nodes, fracture of a floor truss, preexisting cracking, temperature effects, and pier movement._
Good thing you read more of it than I did. I just searched the document for the word “salt”!
I was surprised to hear the claim too. I thought I had read years ago that it was metal fatigue at the welds. Akin to a paper clip being bent to many times some of the welds fatigued to failure due to years of flexing.
The DOT around my area has started using cheese brine to pre treat the roads and it has been doing a pretty decent job.
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Cheese flavored salt water.
Do you live in WI? I am from there and that sounds like the most Wisconsin sentence ever haha!
Oh ya
Long but great read. Thanks for sharing.
One more reason to not have cars.
Do you just bike and walk in ice all winter?
“JuSt TaKe PuBlIc TrAnSiT!”
Oh wait, they shut that down in my state the instant the first flurry hits the ground. “For safety.”
If cities were designed to use public transport first, you wouldn’t be making fun of it. It’s not our fault cities suck at managing transportation.
What if I don’t live in a city and do not wish to?
Then accept that you don’t have on demand access to everything.
Sled dogs and x-country skis
You think it doesn’t snow in Scandinavia?
Not op, but yes? Like people have been doing since homo erectus first migrated to snowy places?
Last I checked, Homo erectus didn’t spend a lot of time walking around on concrete. Nor did they have bicycles.
No matter the mode of transportation, in a built up environment where you’re moving on smooth surfaces where ice can form easily, you need some form of de-icing, sanding, and/or studded tires/shoes.
