2790 Gravel & Salt

Friday, February 26, 2010

The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him.
-- Jim Samuels --

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Until this past storm (more snow/sleet/rain coming over the next four days, by the way), we'd had very little snow. The few days when the temperature was below freezing, the roads were dry. So I really don't understand why the town road crews have been so enthusiastic.

There's so much gravel on my street that you don't slide on ice (there IS no ice), you slide on gravel! There's so much that the road doesn't look paved, it looks like a dirt road.

On the highways it doesn't matter, because there's enough fast traffic that the gravel gets blown to the sides of the road (where it builds up on the berm, clogs the ditches and stormwater drains, and kills lawns). But with very little traffic on our street it just stays there. Several times, on perfectly dry surface, I've slid wide through the curves, at 25 mph, sliding on the gravel.

It's not a sharp-edged gravel. The bits are smoothly rounded, like river pebbles, the largest about the size of the pink part of a fingernail. It doesn't look like the best stuff for traction. "Hey, let's throw little marbles on the road! That'll do it!"

I don't understand.

The town will eventually come around with huge noisy street sweeper machines to gather it all up, but in past years that hasn't happened until June, I guess because we're a rural dead-end road, and by then the gravel and salt-laden sand is all off the road and in the lawns.

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I'm afraid to complain, because then we might get nothing at all. I don't think the highway department management is all that bright. For example, the state is upset because the Hudson River is getting salty further up than the sea tides go, so they blame ships that come up the river and dump seawater ballast, replacing it with fresh river water, which they then sell to islands.

The Hudson is a huge river. It's three times as wide at Kingston as the Mississippi is at St. Louis, and likely a comparable depth. (Maps.google.com - you'll see. It's amazing.) How many ship ballasts would it take to make it brackish? Why has no one noticed that the towns, counties, and state dump thousands of tons of salt on the road every winter, and all that surface runoff eventually ends up in the river? (The ground is frozen. It will ALL be runoff.)

I suspect that it's because it's an easy fix to blame foreign ships. If you blame road salt, you have to fix it, and nobody wants to think about that. The old "Don't complain unless you already have the solution."
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