Road Salt Damage

  • Overuse of salt can cause damage to concrete, steel and the environment. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Each year about 118,000 people are hurt and 1,300 people are killed on
the roads during snowy and icy conditions. So, snowplows hit the
roads, scraping snow and ice off the surface… and spreading
incredible amounts of salt on highways, streets and roads to help keep
them clear. Lester Graham reports there’s some concern about the long-
term effects of all that salt:

Transcript

Each year about 118,000 people are hurt and 1,300 people are killed on
the roads during snowy and icy conditions. So, snowplows hit the
roads, scraping snow and ice off the surface… and spreading
incredible amounts of salt on highways, streets and roads to help keep
them clear. Lester Graham reports there’s some concern about the long-
term effects of all that salt:


This dump truck is getting ready for a load of salt for a coming
winter storm. Salt helps make icy roads safer. It helps prevent
people from slipping and falling on sidewalks. And… it’s pretty
cheap. But there are problems with salt. Salt pollutes and salt
corrodes.


Mark Cornwell has spent a good deal of his career trying to convince
highway crews that there are better ways to keep things safe and reduce
how much salt is dumped on roads and sidewalks:


“Salt basically damages just about everything it comes in contact
with. Salt moves through concrete and attacks structural steel,
bridges, roads, parking structures; it eats the mortar out of bricks
and foundations. It damages limestone, you know, just on and on and
on.”


So, even though salt is cheap, the damage it does costs a lot. It’s a
hidden cost that’s seldom calculated. Imagine the cost of having to
replace a bridge five years early because the structure is weakened by
salt. And then there are your direct costs: trying to keep salt
washed off your vehicle, and still seeing rust attack your car.


Cornwell says there are some cities and road commissioners working to
reduce the amount of salt spread on the roads. But in most places, the
political pressure to get the salt trucks out early, and laying it on
thick to keep drivers happy, outweighs any concerns about trying to
reduce the salt:


“I’m sure the public expects full attention to snow and ice. And they
have absolutely no understanding, however, of what it costs to provide
that.”


Nobody thought a lot about the damage salt was causing until the last
couple of decades. In a few places, the people responsible for keeping
the roads and walkways safe have been trying to reduce the amount of
salt they use and still keep public safety tops on the list of
concerns:


“So, this is our shops. The brine-maker is right here.”


Marvin Petway is showing me some of the tools in his arsenal to reduce
how much salt is used and still keep things safe. He works at the
University of Michigan, where there’s a goal to cut the amount of salt
used in winter in half. What they’ve learned is using innovative ways
of putting down salt can actually help melt snow and ice faster. One
way is to mix it with water to get the chemicals in salt working
a little more quickly:


“Why use 5 pounds of rock salt when you can use 2 gallons of liquid
salt? We’re able to get better coverage, quicker, better cost, and
we’re putting the material that is effective in reducing ice build-up
directly to the area where we don’t want ice located.”


The crews trying to reduce salt use computer assisted spreaders to
measure out only the salt needed, they mix in less corrosive chemicals
that make salt brine more effective, and even just wetting the salt in
dump trucks with chemicals all help to melt snow and ice faster and in
the end use a lot less salt.


Nothing is going to replace salt altogether, but those efforts can add
up to a lot less salt. That means less destruction of infrastructure.


But there are more reasons for reducing salt than the damage to
roadways and parking decks. Salt also damages the environment:


Mark Cornwell first noticed the effects of salt because he was a
horticulturalist. He’d work all spring, summer and fall planting
shrubs, make the grass green, tending beds of flowers. Then the winter
would come:


“Unfortunately what we were doing in six months of winter was
undoing everything we did in the other six months of the year.
If you’re going to get ahead, you’ve got to solve the problem
and in my mind, that was misuse of salt.”


Use too much salt and it kills plants. And it turns out the cost of
using all that cheap salt could be even greater than anyone guessed.
For decades, it’s been assumed that rain washed away most of the salt, but
studies in Ontario find that a lot of the salt doesn’t get washed
away.


Instead, a good deal of it is percolating down into shallow aquifers.
Researchers predict that in the future we’ll start find salt is getting
into the groundwater that supplies many of the wells where we get our
drinking water.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Dancers Mimic Nature’s Form

  • Dancer Anna Beard performing in Dragontree Waterfall Tea at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Photo by Beth Wielinski.

The arts have long been used to draw people’s attention to things… a woman’s mysterious smile, social injustice, or details in the world around us. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports…one choreographer is using dance to encourage people to become more aware of nature:

Transcript

The arts have long been used to draw people’s attention to things – a woman’s mysterious smile,
social injustice, or details in the world around us. As the Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports…one choreographer is using dance to
encourage people to become more aware of nature:


(water trickle)


It’s really cold and gray outside. But the tropical conservatory at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in
Ann Arbor is green and lush. The air is thick with humidity, warmth, and sweet-scented pollen.
The horticulturalists are sweeping up dead leaves, replacing plants, and removing wilted
blossoms. But occasionally the workers lift their heads from what they’re doing to take in an unusual
sight.


There’s a group of dancers, ranging in age from 7 to 70, rehearsing a performance among the
garden’s plants, waterfalls and walkways.


(sound of rehearsal)


They lean against vine-covered walls, prance down paths, and splash water from a fish pond.
Occasionally a dancer’s arm brushes against a branch setting the leaves of a bamboo, papyrus, or
orchid plant in motion. Shirley Axon is an environmental activist and one of the dancers. She
says it’s quite an experience dancing in a lush conservatory instead of a barren stage.


“It’s thrilling…the humidity, the green, the shapes of the plants…
the light, and then to think that we can climb the trees and the walls.”


The dance piece is called Dragontree Waterfall Tea and its creator is Jessica Fogel, a professor
of Dance at the University of Michigan. After choreographing a dance piece for a celebration at
an arboretum over the summer, she realized she just couldn’t imagine going back inside.


“At first I was going to do a snow dance, and then that seemed very unrealistic.”


Eventually she decided an indoor conservatory would be more practical and more comfortable for
both the dancers and the audience. She created this piece by absorbing the shapes, colors, smells,
and stories behind the plants in the garden. Movements the dancers make often mirror the
curves of a plant’s leaves. The dancers also use gesture, props, and pantomime to call attention to
how we use a plant.


“That the papyrus plants can become scrolls upon which messages are written, and that tea comes from these
camellia bushes and can be drunk, and that coffee does come from these beans and chocolate from the trees. So we do play with
those ideas as well, the function of the plants.”


Fogel says we often forget that we depend on plants and
nature for food, medicine, and even paper.
And she hopes this performance will remind people of
our reliance on the natural world. But some parts of the
dance just play with nature.


At one point in the performance, dancer Anna Beard climbs over a wall and down into a waterfall
in the conservatory.


“I step into it and bit by bit I work myself into the water until finally I’m completely immersed in the waterfall.”


She says it’s supposed to be a bit surreal and a bit surprising. She dances soaking wet with the
waterfall splattering down on her body.


“It’s more about existing with the setting and interacting with it instead of just placing some
movement in front of it as a backdrop.”


And unlike a performance in a theater, changes in the garden can affect what the dancers do or
don’t do. During rehearsals, a branch a dancer was supposed to lean against died and was cut off,
another plant grew to be in the way of a dancer’s arm, and some ground cover the dancers were
told they could walk on turned into a path of slippery mud.


Dancer Raphael Griffin says as she performs in the conservatory, she has to be very cautious of
the impact her movements make. The rock ledges are uneven and the plants fragile. And she
says that sense of the dancers treading lightly on the environment is something she hopes the
audience picks up on.


“Just a better awareness of nature and how the human body can interact with nature and yet not
ruin it either.”


Most of us will never get a chance to frolic in a conservatory like Raphael Griffin and the other
dancers in Dragontree Waterfall Tea , but as one dancer pointed out there’s nothing stopping us
from going out into our own backyards to enjoy and appreciate the line, movement, and form in
the natural world around us.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.

Activities May Ease Alzheimer’s Disease (Part 1)

  • This garden at the Family Life Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed specifically to help Alzheimer's patients.

About 19 million Americans have a family member with
Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a diagnosis that can send a family reeling.
For
patients, even simple tasks become increasingly difficult, as the
disease
robs them of their memory. And for families, caring for an Alzheimer’s
patient often becomes a fulltime job. In the first of a two-part
series, the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports new approaches
in Alzheimer’s treatment are offering hope to both patients and their
families:

Alzheimer’s Patients Take Up Gardening (Part 2)

  • Family Life Center founder, Cynthia Longchamps (right), and program participant JoAnn Scott. Longchamps says the sound of this waterfall helps soothe Alzheimer's patients, and its location encourages them to walk farther into the garden.

People have often turned to nature to rejuvenate their spirit –
whether they take a hike in the woods, or just look out the window. Now
there’s a type of therapy that taps into these powers of nature. In the
second of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson visits a "healing garden":

A Revolution Among Plant Scientists

Scientists are discovering new genetic information about plants is
upsetting the natural order of things. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports that they’re also finding a whole new
world of possibilities for using plants for medicines and products:

Not So Poisonous Poinsettias

The poinsettia is a popular symbol of the holiday
season. But the colorful plants have been stigmatized as highly toxic.
And for years, people have been warned to keep them away from children
and pets. But this season, you may be able to rest easy, unafraid of
your poinsettia plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson
explains: