The Seattle Times | Susan Kelleher | Dec. 23, 2008
To hear the city’s spin, Seattle’s road crews are making “great progress” in clearing the ice-caked streets. But it turns out “plowed streets” in Seattle actually means “snow-packed,” as in there’s snow and ice left on major arterials by design.
“We’re trying to create a hard-packed surface,” said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation. “It doesn’t look like anything you’d find in Chicago or New York.” The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.
The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.
“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.”
By ruling out salt and some of the chemicals routinely used by snowbound cities, Seattle has embraced a less-effective strategy for clearing roads, namely sand sprinkled on top of snowpack along major arterials, and a chemical de-icer that is effective when temperatures are below 32 degrees.
Seattle also equips its plows with rubber blades. That minimizes the damage to roads and manhole covers, but it doesn’t scrape off the ice, Wiggins said.
That leaves many drivers, including Seattle police, pretty much on their own until nature does to the snow what the sand can’t: melt it.
The city’s patrol cars are rear-wheel drive. And even with tire chains, officers are avoiding hills and responding on foot, according to a West Precinct officer.
[…]
Although the city had plowed 29 of its 36 major routes, “nothing is clear,” Kuck said late Monday afternoon. “This is a difficult and challenging situation that’s going to take us a long time to recover from.”
Wiggins, of Seattle’s transportation department, said the city’s 27 trucks had plowed and sanded 100 percent of Seattle’s main roads, and were going back for second and third passes.
“It’s tough going. I won’t argue with you on that,” he said. But here in Seattle, “we’re sensitive about everything we do that impacts the environment.”
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What a dangerous situation this liberal/leftist lunacy and nonsense has created for the people of Seattle. Imagine you are a person in need of emergency medical assistance (heart attack, stroke, etc.) and the ambulances cannot reach, or a victim of a crime and the police vehicles cannot drive to where you are because of this isanity. Also, I was not aware that “salt” polutes ocean water! The idiocy from the left gets worse and worse every year, with dangerous and life threatening consequences for the rest of us.
I live in Oregon, and we’ve never salted the roads, at least not in the half-century I’ve been here. Here’s what the Oregon Dept. of Transportation says:
“The Oregon Department of Transportation doesn’t use salt because it has detrimental effects to vehicles, structures and the environment. Salt, rock salt or road salt are the common terms for sodium chloride, a product traditionally used in the Midwest and eastern United States. While road salt is an effective tool for melting snow and ice, it also causes severe rust damage to vehicles, degrades the road surface, corrodes bridges and may harm roadside vegetation.”
So the roads are a little slicker which often means chains, but we don’t have the underside of our cars eaten away either. Out here both conservatives and liberals seem to like the idea of intact metal on their cars, and I’ve never heard anyone complain about roads not being salted.
In Oregon and Washington I don’t think the issue is road salt. It’s the lack of snow plows. The main roads get plowed, but not much else. But the problem is that we can go through an entire winter and not get any snow at all. Or we occasionally get buried. So how much money does it make sense to invest in equipment that would rarely be used?
Currently we are in fact buried. I’m basically frozen in place, and the snow is so deep it’s difficult to walk. With a three foot high snow drift in my driveway and an unplowed street with about two feet of snow on it, I’m not going anywhere, salt or no salt.