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Snow and ice removal

Started by hbelkins, December 29, 2022, 02:30:31 PM

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pderocco

Maybe someone from the PacNW can help me understand something about snow removal.

I used to live near Portland part time back in the '90s. One year, toward the end of the decade, both Oregon and Washington started mitigating the occasional snow that would fall on the roads between I-5 and the coast not with salt but with fine gravel. All of a sudden, thousands of people found themselves with cracked windshields, from the larger particles getting kicked up by other vehicles. I had three cracks in mine. A few people reported that they thought they had been shot at.

But the worst part was that it turns out that this gravel makes an excellent grinding compound. By the spring, the freeways between Portland and Seattle (and probably others elsewhere) had developed inch-deep ruts in every lane where the vehicles' wheels go. When it rained (which is almost always during the wet half of the year), these formed puddles that caused hydroplaning, so people had to drive off-center in the lanes in order to maintain control.

By the time I left in 2000, it seemed like they had stopped doing this, and had patched or repaved some of the roads. I never went back until recently, and I noticed that they seem to have done it again, although less severely. I found parts of various highways that had slight ruts, and I saw many roads that had telltale stripes of darker asphalt down them indicating ruts that had been patched. Is this now the policy in the northwest? Use some sand or gravel that isn't so coarse that it causes cracked windshields, but that forms slight ruts, and then patch them periodically?


triplemultiplex

We develop wheel-path ruts fairly readily in the upper Midwest; particularly in areas where there are a lot of heavy logging trucks on the roads.  Since we definitely salt our roads, I'm thinking the ruts you see in the Northwest are not from using sand during occasional low elevation snow/ice.  But rather they are the result of wear from heavy trucks. 
"That's just like... your opinion, man."

pderocco

^^^ Except that the inch-deep ruts first appeared in the same year that everyone's windshields were cracked by the gravel they started using.



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