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Mag chloride can be applied as granule or liquid. We used our herbicide sprayer trucks to apply it. Especially on elevated roadways or bridges. With Mag chloride you have to spray and get traffic on it. Most drivers believed that since we sprayed the roads they can still do 70 mph on it. They found out different. Then LEO would close a road because said dolt bought 250’ of guardrail. Doing his job. After the city opened a combined commo center that all got a lot better. I or my coworker was setting right across table from a LEO contact. And we have multiple roadway cams on trouble locales. Things got lots better. Austin PD organized an expressway section. Worked nothing but major hwys. Those guys were phenominal! We worked very well together.

Our county roads foreman showed me a sample of a byproduct of distilling corn into ethanol they were boosting as a deicer, I don't know how that paned out?

Yeah. Lots have changed since I retired. I dunno what all is used now. My info is dated I’m sure. They may have an all new strategy now with a vast aray of products! I know some places were installing deicing systems on roadways like an irrigation system. On a different note I appreciate the lighted traffic buttons on I-70 west of Denver! They are nice.

Syracuse a.k.a. Salt City. Quite valuable real estate in the early days for the salt springs. So salt on the roads is a sort of recycling. And they use plenty. First place I heard the term "winter rat." Keep your nice car garaged and drive a rust bucket in winter. Or next winter your nice car will have become a winter rat. One spring day I had to drive to Camillus. Roads clear all the way but could see white when I got to Camillus. WTF? Yup salt. Getting rid of the leftover from winter I guessed.

Trivia: Salt shipped to NYC on the canal system would get chunky from the humidity. The most menial of menial jobs was knocking it apart for the shakers. Hence the dismissive term, "Go pound salt." NOT pound sand - pet peeve.

And just think.......... Depending on where you grew up, some people don't even know what road salt really is. Because they don't even know what rock salt is, because they've never heard of it or seen it. Many years ago I was talking to some girls in a bar in the San Joaquin valley in California. The topic got to be winter and they were asking me about the snow and winter in general in western NY state. Told them all about it and when I got to talking about snow plows and spreading salt on the roads a couple of them called B.S. on me. Turns out they never even heard of rock salt and when they heard the word "salt"; it meant table salt because that's the only salt they ever saw or heard of. I still chuckle at them imagining a 10 wheel dump with a salt spreader on the back filled with umpteen tons of table salt. Of course we were all imbibing at the time but it was still hilarious.

Even though it is a by-product, just think of all the people who are starving because they used the corn for that. (Not to mention all the widows and orphans who are starving because of the way that it cuts into petroleum profits.)

All the deicers are hard on fenders.

Hate to damage a good Stratocaster.

Remember that bad river bridge failure in what Minneapolis (?) few years back??? That was attributed to roadway salt as the primary cause if I remember correctly. Bridge inspector s should have caught that one. . Got in expansion joints and other metal structure. We had a bridge failure somewhere out west around Ft. Stockton (I believe) on I-10 few years back. Wasn’t as catastrophic.

Beet juice when it is really cold.

I35 West - we were on a fly-in in Canada when it happened. Heard about it when we came out. We had crossed it the week before. One of my son's college friends drove it twice a day and had gone over it not long before it went down.

I'm told salt will not thaw ice below 10F.

Something like that. We used to keep magnesium chloride deicer for the entrance way for extra cold days. The previous maintenance guy used all magnesium chloride stuff, dyed a nice green. The salesman loved him. Is easier on the cement (less freeze-thaw) and grass though.

They've been pretreating the MD roads with a 22 percent salt and 78 percent water mixture. Does seem to make a big difference in giving them time to plow and it reduced the state budget and use of granular salt by more than 50%.

Good for the budget and environment. Of course, we don't get a huge amount of snow here close to the bay.

Thanks! I thought it was a I-35 structure. Hard to imagine that many of the structures on the Interstate hwy system are 50-60 years old now. Some have been replaced some havent. They are showing their age.

Our last governor and his brother owned a chain of truck stop/gas stations that had drive through car washes. We salted the chit outta everything when he was in charge.

Same guy bought I don't know how many pails of "As Seen On TV" magic drain cleaner. Not as bad as lye but the plumber threatened not to work on plugs with any chemical cleaner. Pails of the stuff are still in the basement for all I know.

Primary concern for us was closed roadways = Lost revenue on all fronts. Time loss= big $$$$. The $$$ figures were pretty staggering. Always about da money. 😁Oh well, not gonna worried over it now. 👍👍👍

There's a huge salt mine under Lake Erie.

http://www.rockthelake.com/buzz/2017/12/cargill-salt-mine-cleveland/

The term salary derives from salt Some soldiers were paid with salt. "Worth his salt."