Portland’s second fling with road salt appeared to go better than its first, as city transportation officials credited the salt with helping keep some roadways open.
City road crews started applying road salt shortly after midnight, when freezing rain began to cause slick roads across the city.
Salt applied early Friday morning on Southeast Mount Scott Boulevard helped turn ice to slush. The road had been closed in previous storms this winter, rendered impassible by ice, but remained open Friday.
The city said salt had also been effective on Southwest Terwilliger Boulevard early Friday. It sent trucks to Northwest Skyline Boulevard and Northwest Germantown Road, stretches of each were Friday morning, to try to improve conditions.
Roads had also been pretreated with a liquid solution of magnesium chloride, the city’s usual deicer.
Friday was only the second time salt had been used on Portland roads in modern memory.
After a January snowstorm, road crews from Seattle laid down salt they had brought along on several city streets. But the city said at the time the salt was no more effective than its usual magnesium chloride.
Neither deicer, however, was especially effective when applied to several inches of compacted snow and ice.
The recent tests showed more promise, but the narrow roads where it was used didn’t allow for the side-by-side tests the city had hoped for.
“We’ve shared some initial impressions of the results, but we feel like this needs to be an ongoing thing,” said Dylan Rivera, a spokesman for the Portland transportation bureau. “We expect to continue to test salt and learn how it’s used.”
The city made a last-minute order for 100 tons of salt at a cost of $19,500, or $195 a ton. That’s far more than the average bulk cost of rock salt, which was around $50 a ton last year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“We’re certainly paying a premium for ordering the material on just a few days’ notice and in a relatively small quantity,” Rivera said.
The city also ordered a formulation of salt that includes an anti-corrosive agent and which is broken down to a coarseness similar to gravel the city puts down to provide traction. That, Rivera said, would allow the city to use less of the gravel.
That also increased the cost compared to regular bulk salt.
If salt became a regular fixture of the city’s winter-weather arsenal — and the transportation bureau will seek funding to do so in the city’s next budget cycle — it would likely pay a far lower rate, Rivera said.
“When you’re buying it by the railcar instead of the truckload, you can save money,” he said. “We would expect to pay with volume discounts, about one-third of what this was.”
— Elliot Njus
enjus@oregonian.com
503-294-5034
@enjus
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