There’s a heavy boom outside from the drop of a front-mounted plow blade. The sound shakes window panes and sets off a car alarm. A six-wheeled city truck with an eleven-foot dump body with flashing orange lights passes by, scraping snow from the surface of the road as it hustles along.
Six inches of snowfall had been expected overnight, but in the morning it’s closer to eight in the Rondout. To anyone who doesn’t have to navigate across town to show up for work or stock up on groceries, there’s not much difference. For the drivers and laborers at the Kingston Department of Public Works (DPW) who’ve been working all night, every little bit adds up.
“Since we are a union shop,” says DPW superintendent Ed Norman, “everything is based on seniority and rotational callout lists. After hours, we have an on-duty foreman, who monitors what’s happening outside — when and where it’s starting to stick on the streets. Sometimes we will get calls from the Kingston Police Department to say that we have a slippery spot or two, or we’re having accidents.”
Norman suspects there may be a glaze of ice underneath the snow, but rules out large-scale icing, pointing out that the ground temperature was still relatively warm throughout the night.
“It’s very slushy and slippery, right now, underneath a heavy, wet snow,” says Norman. “We’ve had a couple of trucks get stuck. Matter of fact, our loader is heading out up to Fairveiw Avenue to pull one out right now.”
In light of predictions released by NOAA anticipating a nor’easter with winds gusting as high as 40 miles per hour and the possibility of over a foot of snow, an official snow emergency had been declared in the City of Kingston on Monday, March 13.
Central Hudson prepared for 10,000 to 40,000 customers to lose power throughout its service area.
As it happened, temperatures stayed high enough that by 11 p.m. what rain was falling had slackened off to a drizzle. The dire prediction seemed like a dud.
Every storm is different
Then the snow began to fall around midnight.
Forecasting the weather is a crapshoot. The workers of the Kingston DPW have learned to live with the uncertainty and to fall back on institutional experience.
“Over 30 years I’ve been here, and every storm is different,” says shop supervisor Ed Sweeney. “Whether it be equipment, manpower, ground temperatures … from uptown to downtown Kingston, there could be a difference in two inches of snow, and three or four degrees in road temperature. Down by the creek, the ground temperature is going to be a lot colder, and it’s going to freeze over a lot quicker than if you were uptown. So this requires sitting down a day prior to the storm and putting a plan together.”
Typically the state Department of Transportation will send over briefings projecting an approximate accumulation and data from NOAA (the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). As Sweeney notes, these are only guidelines.
“Perfect example,” says Norman, “two weeks ago, that snow event over the weekend, we were only supposed to get about an inch or two of snow. So when we started off we said, Okay, well we’re going to need two or three trucks out at 9 p.m., and then at 11 o’clock I want eight more, and then you know as the night goes on the snow never stops, so we had to keep calling people to come in. And in the end, it ends up being a general callout, which means everybody gets a phone call. All hands on deck.”
A city with 340 streets
Fitted with plows and salt spreaders, the fleet of city trucks, large and small, is activated.
“All our big trucks, meaning any truck over 26,000 pounds, are diesel,” explains Sweeney. “On the average of 350 horsepower, 1200 to 1400 foot-pounds of torque. And most of them are six-wheelers. They are coming in at about 41,000 pounds GBWR [gross vehicle weight rating]. Including the salt and equipment on the truck, we cannot be over that 41,000.”
Most DPW drivers carry class B commercial driver’s licenses. They themselves are responsible for complying with the weight limits. The responsibility comes with the license. It is they and not the city that will receive the ticket and pay the penalty for any violation.
The drivers all have tanker endorsements as well, a certification that allows them to haul liquid or gas in bulk. That’s necessary because the department from time to time operates vehicles which carry over 1000 gallons of water.
For snow events, a salt brine solution has been prepared by mingling sodium chloride, the chemical name for rock salt, with water to make a 23 percent salt-brine solution for use in pre-wetting roads before a snowfall.
The salt brine not only helps prevent ice from forming but also provides moisture for the rock salt scattered on the road, which needs moisture to activate its own de-icing process. In its own humble way, salt brine cuts down the amount of rock salt needed.
As for melting ice on its own, employees of the DPW are skeptical. “There has been storms where it worked well,” notes Sweeney, “and there’s been three storms after that where we didn’t really see a difference.”
“If it’s really cold, the ground’s very cold, then we’ll put the brine out,” adds Norman. “And that gives us a little bit of time to help create a layer between the asphalt surface and the falling snow itself.”
If the snow keeps falling, putting down a layer of salt brine and scattering rock salt on top will be insufficient. Above three inches, the plowing must begin. Three hundred and forty streets in the city. All hands on deck.
“We have priority routes with trucks that are dedicated specifically to them,” says deputy superintendent Ryan Coon. “And then within each route itself, there are the highly traveled roads and secondary roads and dead ends. If you know a road in your area is more highly traveled than another, then you try and keep that one as clean as possible to allow people to get in and out of a neighborhood. Or a road that happens to be more treacherous than another. Like Ravine Street, for example. You try and keep that as clear as possible because once you lose it, it’s gone.”
Rising 160 feet from the Rondout Creek at the bottom, and pitched near the top at a harrowing angle even without the snow, Ravine Street is the Rondout’s own Matterhorn.
Several things at one time
“The trucks might be snow fighters,” says Norman, “but nothing goes well on ice. So even we have trouble from time to time.”
Going by low temperatures and heavy snow events, this winter of 2023 has been relatively tame. The winter of 2022 saw residents endure a number of large snow events that had them digging their driveways /and sidewalks out on multiple occasions. And then of course there was the February ice storm.
“Weeks of work,” recalls Norman ruefully. “And up to a couple of months of cleanup of debris afterwards because all the property owners were bringing all their stuff out from their yards and piling it up on the sides of the roads. We just kept picking it up and getting rid of it.
“What most taxpayers don’t realize is say, when we get an ice storm, we can’t concentrate on just an ice storm, we have sewer lines that may be clogged at the time. We still have to pick up garbage, so we’re doing several different things at one time. You can only leave garbage on a curb so long before you start getting into health codes”
DPW workers are familiar with this work environment where regardless of their area of expertise every type of job may be required of them.
“Even on snowy days, we try to get the garbage picked up,” says Norman, “But with the previous storm that we had there, we actually canceled trash pickup for that day just so we had extra availability of bodies of personnel to be able to drive the plow trucks. Not only for the general public, but for emergency vehicles, police department, fire department. We have different divisions within the DPW, but everybody is under the same umbrella. Nobody’s above working down. We all work down from time to time.”
“You know in other municipalities,” says Coon, “especially in the rural areas, they have the ability to shove the snowbanks back. They can push them into the woods. They can push them into people’s yards, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have that ability here. We don’t have a place to put it. It’s either going to be in the street or on the sidewalk.”
On-street parking in Kingston provides a large hurdle to doing a quality snow-removal job quickly. Last year, says Norman, a law was passed that during snow emergencies (snowfall of three inches or more), parking anywhere along the snow emergency routes was forbidden, under penalty of having the offending car towed. For residents who would otherwise have no place to park, city parking lots were available.
“Typically, on a first storm of the winter we will only ticket on a snow emergency route and give warnings for everything else,” says Norman. “After that initial storm, we will issue tickets and tow from the emergency routes. During the 2023 season, we had 73 tickets issued for additional emergency routes, and 411 warnings, I believe, for the rest of the city. So there, there are still compliance issues.”
While on-street parking and snow plowing show every likelihood of remaining at cross-purposes, the method of managing icy roads through the use of rock salt bears examination.
The trouble with rock salt
On the backs of some city trucks are mounted mechanical salt spreaders, stainless-steel V-type hoppers with turning augers at the bottom that keep the rock salt churning out to spinners which scatter the salt crystals over the road behind the truck. On others, a chain with slats feeds the rock salt out to the spinner; a hydraulic flow valve operated from within the driver’s cab speeds the chain up or slows it down, allowing the operator to improvise how much salt any given stretch of road requires.
Rock salt, whose chemical name is sodium chloride, makes the road safer to drive on because it has the ability to lower the freezing point of water. Even at twelve degrees below freezing (20°F), water remains a liquid in the presence of sodium chloride. Salt crystals interact with moisture. The scaffolding on which the compound chemical is built dissolves, releasing sodium ions and chloride ions from their chemical bonds,. This “freezing point depression” interferes with the formation of the rigid structure known as ice.
The advocates of sodium chloride can assemble a formidable political lobby in favor of the status quo. The Highway Users Alliance advocates for more drivers on the road. NSC Minerals (formerly the NuSalt Corporation), advocates for more salt.
Keeping the numbers of humans injured or dead down by the cunning application of rock salt every winter, however, comes with a cumulative price.
A 2018 study released through the peer-reviewed journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences) found a statistical increase in salinization across North America after demonstrates that compared to the 50 years after the adoption of road salting became widespread in the 1960s. Two-thirds of stream and river sites showed increases. The supply of water which can be used for drinking is limited. Only two and a half percent of the water on the planet is fresh water.
Our rivers, lakes, reservoirs and aquifers are all we’ve got.
In addition, riparian animals and myriad freshwater aquatic organisms need this resource as much if not more than we do.
The sodium chloride scattered onto the streets of Kingston every year melts away into snow runoff, and thence into roadside embankments and catch basins. Other salts, like calcium chloride and magnesium chloride, are even more effective at de-icing roads and are less toxic to the environment. At the current price per ton of $66.41, Kingston pays about $100,000 for the 1500 tons it orders each year.
Many other municipalities scatter sand with their salt, but unfortunately Kingston’s use of catch basins and sewer lines precludes this mix. “We don’t want to add any additional dirt and grit to our sewer storm lines,” explains Norman, “and also we want to keep it out of the treatment plant. It winds up costing us more to actually get rid of the grit. Everything has a price. If we’ve got to take it to get rid of it at a landfill, it’s just an extra expenditure.”
Keep on truckin’
Environmentally-minded Midwestern communities are experimenting with beet juice and cheese brine to battle ice and snow. Absent local beet farming or the scale of Wisconsin’s cheese industry, these are not viable solutions for Kingston.
“All those have their own issues,” says Norman, “ If we start spreading beet juice on the streets, we’ll get complaints that it smells. Same thing with the cheese, if it runs into the catch basins and [gets] stagnant, and that creates a smell. Salt is a given. We have it readily available. We have the brine equipment to make the solution, so that’s what we stay with. Our trucks are set up with the brine pumps. So you stick with what works.”
So far, it’s working. The rock salt scattered on the streets of Kingston saves lives and attracts fewer vermin than cheese brine in the catch basins would. For now, while elected leaders hash out the pros and cons between environmental health and financial gain, in the meantime, apolitically, the DPW will keep on keeping on.
“Department of Public Works has to play the hand that they’re dealt,” concludes Coon. “We have no control over the dealer or the cards. And that’s really the bottom line. We just have to be ready. People forget that this is New York. That it’s winter. You’re going to be inconvenienced, right? We’re here to help. We’re here to clear the streets.”
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