Quote:
Originally Posted by gutbuster
A real Winter. The kind that makes a few attempts to kill you.
When I was a kid people learned to drive in snow. We used to grab onto bumpers and hitch a ride. Nowadays people want to get to work without having to slow down. The towns buy mountains of salt and spread it around generously.
It’s not just the cars that get ruined. The roads and bridges take a big hit.
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When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s to now, the amount of salt applied to roads is incredibly high. I can't remember exactly, but I think newspaper articles have reported at least 4x historical amounts. It is ridiculous. Cars are safer now than they have ever been with anti-lock brakes and traction control, all wheel drive, etc, but people seem to freak out about snow entirely out of proportion to how dangerous it is. If a road isn't clear in a few hours with plow trucks and salt, people think its the end of the world. And municipalities and land owners are terrified of being sued, so they slather the salt on, the more the better. I remember sledding down streets and driving on hard packed snow all the time as a kid. Never happens now. Come on people, snow is fun!
Roads, cars, bridges, all that is affected like you said, but people forget about the impacts on the water. It all washes into the local streams. I work in the environmental field and can tell you firsthand that chloride and conductivity levels after snow melts in urban areas can peak to near seawater levels. It is wreaking havoc on the aquatic life. Drinking water aquifers have seen steady rising salinity levels since the 80s, directly attributed to the higher salt application rates. Soon it will be an expense to desalinize public drinking water supplies. We've been working to demonstrate the impact, but it mostly falls on deaf ears. I've seen areas in Nova Scotia that ban the use of salt to protect the National Park wetlands, so I wonder if they will ever enact restrictions here in the US. Something needs to be done because its out of control now. I surmise some sort of recommendation based on lbs per road miles per storm should be in order. My 2 cents.
Myriad