Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Road Salt?

ha hahaa - funny ...

empty salt domes are used to store a lot of crude oil, Strategic Petroleum Reserve

The Quapaw of Southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana and other northern Louisiana Caddoan groups were bigtime salt traders. They pretty much had themselves a good monopoly going!

Worked out well for the Onondagas in Syracuse too.

Out West, most of the road treatment comes from the Salt Lake in Utah. They pump lake water out into huge evaporating ponds during the summer and let the sun concentrate the brine. It naturally contains Calcium Chloride, Magnesium Chloride, and I would think a little Sodium Chloride.

No [bleep] Sherlock!

Science Daily

No one cares though as long as they don't have to slow down because the roads are icy.


Jerry

LOL!!!! Yup! Reminds me of the time I had to meet our environmental guys and the Texas Dept of Env quaility guys out at the world famous I-35 and McNeil overpass in Round Rock Texas concering disposal of literally a mountain of bat guano. All washing down the gutter into Lake Creek. I asked them why I had to report to them a 5 gallon diesel spill and do a env clean up on it when all this high nitrate guano was washing into a primary water shed???? They told me to shut up and NEVER bring that subject up again!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣 They were very serious!

Edit! There BIGGEST concern was that we had “Do not touch or handle dead bats” signs posted all over the place in english and spanish. Seriously!!!! Came to find out that was the only reason for my being there.

I’m not Gus, but was in the road salt business before retiring.
There is a 400 million year old ( give or take a few weeks) dried up sea bed under the NE USA and part of Ontario. It’s under Ohio, Mich, Ontario and NY. And it stretches up to New Brunswick. The depth of that salt bed varies but is about 1500-2000 feet below the surface. That salt is mined by multiple methods. For road salt mine shafts are dug and the the salt is mined by drilling holes into the salt seam, filling them with explosives, blowing it up, them crushing and screening to make a certain size. In some cases, the horizontal mining tunnels reach several miles under Lake Erie, or some of the NY finger lakes. This salt is not pure enough for table salt, when mined by drill and blast. This same salt is however mined for human consumption by evaporative methods. In this case 12” or so holes are bored into the salt deposit from the surface. Hot water is pumped into the salt deposit. The water dissolves some creating salt brine. That is pumped to the surface. Then the water is evaporated off and you’re left with very pure salt. There are some more processes to get it to the right gradual size for human consumption but that’s the gist of it.
There are also drill and blast and evaporative mines in central Kansas, but they are only about 600 feet deep. And there are mines in Louisiana along the coast. The salt deposits there are domes, or more of a vertical deposit vs horizontal in the NE USA. And there are evaporative plant there as well.
In Utah, there is a third mining process, called solar evap. Here Salt Lake water is pumped into a shallow pond. The wind and sun evaporate some of the water increasing the salt concentration. Then that brine is bumped through a sequence of ponds until it essentially solidifies. It is then scraped up and is used for water softening and very small amounts in table salt.
That’s the high level over view of where road salt and other salt come from.

Well its all about concentration. If you look at steep hills on mountain passes in the summer you'll see next to no vegetation close to the shoulder of the road as its been pounded with salt all winter. Get out 20 feet or so and everything looks normal. Small water courses are vulnerable though you don't want to run a downspout collecting road water right in to a little crick. Most fresh water fish and some aquatic creatures can't handle much salt, they'll die. So you see on newer highways there'll be settling ponds thick with bull rushes to deconcentrate the salt before it gets into a creek or river.

Best thing that's happened in the last.. I don't know maybe 25 years is the use of brine. Someone mentioned it back there very simple just dump a bunch of salt in a tank with water and mix it up good and spray it out the back of a truck. Had it figured that roughly a third salt was needed to cover a given distance with brine vs dry salt. Way more efficient you don't get trucks blowing it off the road so much. Brine is only good though for treating for black ice or before a snow storm. Once you're in the thick of it in a snow storm you gotta kick it old school and put out sand or better sand mixed with about 3% salt, or if its warm enough straight dry salt. Salt reliably works to about -4C I'd say anything colder than about -6C (about 20 F) and you can forget about salt. In fact it can work against you, melting a bit then freezing. Mag Chloride and some other chemicals will work colder but a lot more expensive and probably a little more nasty on the environment.

We got some dirt trucked in that was dug up to widen a highway, it has some limerock in it. Any place we have used it not much but weeds will grow. I wonder about salt.

Too much lime could be the deal too? some plants like alkaline soil some hate it.

Your were saying back there Wabi that Windsor salt is big around the great lakes, yes they're huge. They seem to be more higher end products AFAIK, table salt and small bags for your driveway at the hardware store etc. For industrial use Lafarge the concrete company is in to salt in a big way around here.

I don't much care where any of it comes from but I think a bunch of it should be dissolved in water and used to give a high pressure enema to those who further it's use. I hate it. I hate that billions of dollars are spent sprerading it on highways just so a bunch of shivering puzzies can get out on the road. It eats up my vehicles. It attracts deer, elk, and sheep to the highway where they get hit by the aforementioned drivers. Where we would otherwise be driving on compacted snow or ice, we are driving on three inches of slimy, briny, dirty, slush. Out on the prairies, before the use of salt became widespread, the snow mostly blew off the roads. Sometime in the '70's some jurisdictions started salting the intersections and, on the highway, those were the only places where the snow built up. The answer, of course. was to put more salt there so the snow would build up deeper. In the late '70's, Alberta saw a huge influx of people from Ontario and they brought their salt with them. The bastards. GD

If "they" and "we" decided to stop using salt we'd get by for sure. Fatal car crash numbers with today's traffic volumes and speeds would go through the roof though. It is what it is. I hate salt on roads too but I'm glad we have it.

I'm a bridge engineer responsible for maintenance on state roadways. We call it bridge remover. Nothing is as detrimental to the integrity of structural components as salt, brine and calcium chloride. The past cpuple of winter seasons have been mild for us so the amount of salt put down has been minimal to the norm. It does a good job in keeping roads clear but is hell on equipment and steel.

It keeps you in business though don't it 'Grad

I agree its pure hell on bridges man there's no two ways about it. Highway 5 near here was constructed in 1986 through the Cascades into the interior of BC. It was a huge economic advantage in many ways, its busy hauling most of the freight in and out of Vancouver from points east and saving hours from the old route. These days every summer one or more of the many bridges are a big construction zone as they pretty much rebuild them from the abutments and piers up. Rusted re-bar sticking out of the concrete lumps that are broken up and hauled away. Bridges don't last long up there and it co$t$ big time. Yep no one hates salt more than bridge guys....

Business is too busy sometimes because of it. The problem is that due to being elevated, bridges are where you need salt the most to lower the freezing point.
Thankfully I'm in central NC which is fairly mild but the guys in the mountains and those down east with salt spray have it rougher than we do. Best thing we have done is moved away from steel girders towards concrete precast girders and box beams where possible. Elastomeric bearing plates too. Sometimes steel is inevitable due to required span lengths but most of our new bridges are concrete. Is it the right call long term? That has yet to be determined but as long as you keep the chlorides out of the concrete through sealers/epoxy treatments, they seem to be better from what I can tell. Steel decks and girders cause us more headaches than about anything other than timber....still a lot of timber decks, abutment and substructure out there.

Ever watch "Modern Marvels" on the History Channel? They did an hour-long episode on "Salt", and besides the aforementioned salt in NYS, there's also a huge deposit under Kansas, too. The TV show actually went into how they got out table salt, road salt, etc. Yeah, I was REALLY bored when I watched that, but it turned out to be halfway interesting.

I live about 10 miles south of the Salt River in Kentucky, where apparently there was a nearby salt lick that contaminated the river enough to give it that name. Kentucky has a lot of salt licks, there's probably some salt underground here, too.

I can't remember if this mine is the same, or if not there is another if it hasn't been flooded that's under Erie that was owned by Morton. They were having a lot of water problems. Many, many pumps totaling thousands of horsepower running daily to keep the water out.
I used to work for the company that made the "crusher feeder breaker" that the narrator in the above link speaks of.

There also one or more mines of this type in the New Iberia, Avery Island area of La. One is gone though.. Remember when an oil exploration Co. was drilling in the bottom of a lake in La. & drilled into a mine? What a mess.

Long term effect on enemies during war - salt the fields.

They used to Mike, for 75 years the best thing that can happen to a country is for the US to defeat them in war.

Not to sidetrack.