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Tonka
Well-Known Member
Ok time for a boring story about road salt and rust.
Every winter I run about maybe 10,000 miles just in snow, in a tractor-trailer, keeping the grocery store shelves stocked with meat in the communist blue states out east. I usually run between the west end of Iowa and New England. Mostly, ... but I do run out to Seattle sometimes.
It's not hard to do. If there is snow ANYWHERE in this region, I'm gonna find it and drive in it.
The crap they spread on the road varies by county, not by state. Out west when you get into the tree-hugger states that care more about fish in the nearby creeks than they do for human lives, they either don't put anything on the roads at all, or they just spread sand.
But here in the rust belt, you'll encounter all sorts of different stuff. Minnesota likes to spread black cinders along I-90, which doesn't help much because the wind just blows it into the fields. (It is never NOT windy along I-90 across southern MN in the winter.)
Iowa uses salt, mostly. Illinois, I don't know what they use. IN and OH use a variety of different stuff. The Pennsylvania Turnpike gets called the "Pennsylvania Saltpike" in the winter because it requires at least a gallon of washer fluid just to make it from Ohio to Breezewood.
Depending on where you're at, I've seen them spreading salt, saltwater, cinders, sand, some kind of tan-colored stuff, and one time on the Ohio Turnpike I saw them spreading BLUE PELLETS. I tried to figure out what it was, and called my dad and had him do a google search and he was only finding conspiracy theory sites suggesting it was "Prussian Blue", which is a form of cyanide. I seriously doubt they would spread cyanide on the roads. In some areas they run a sprayer on the interstate, spraying some kind of liquid, most likely saltwater, just because snow is in the forecast.
In November of 2006 I was issued a brand new, $100,000 Volvo 670 model tractor. The truck was BRAND NEW. Unlike 4 wheelers, the frames on 18 wheelers are painted at the factory. And they use good paint.
By January 2007, after only 2 months of going back and forth from the midwest and the east coast, and one snow & ice-filled adventure over the rockies to Seattle and back, I was in the wash bay washing the truck and noticed surface rust on the paint around the bolts on the truck's frame.
By summer there was paint chipping and flaking off of the bolts that hold a frame crossmember in place. There's a socket on the back of the cab where the light cord plugs in, that never gets un-plugged because we only disconnect it regularly at the trailer end. The electrodes had been coated liberally with that white di-electric grease stuff when the truck was new. But there was corrosion in there and it had to be rewired to keep the trailer lights working.
That stuff they put on the roads is TERRIBLY corrosive and I suspect that since they seem to have fewer rust AND snow-related accident problems in the northern states like ND, MT and WA, where they have MORE snow, but don't use salt, ... there's got to be some kind of scam going on.
The great lakes region is also where GM, Ford and Chrysler have their roots. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan all have a vested interest in keeping their automotive industries going. So I think they probably put this super-corrosive stuff on the roads just to sell more cars, in states where the big automakers have political influence.
That's just my half-assed theory anyway. I'm not even wearing my tinfoil hat today.
Every winter I run about maybe 10,000 miles just in snow, in a tractor-trailer, keeping the grocery store shelves stocked with meat in the communist blue states out east. I usually run between the west end of Iowa and New England. Mostly, ... but I do run out to Seattle sometimes.
It's not hard to do. If there is snow ANYWHERE in this region, I'm gonna find it and drive in it.
The crap they spread on the road varies by county, not by state. Out west when you get into the tree-hugger states that care more about fish in the nearby creeks than they do for human lives, they either don't put anything on the roads at all, or they just spread sand.
But here in the rust belt, you'll encounter all sorts of different stuff. Minnesota likes to spread black cinders along I-90, which doesn't help much because the wind just blows it into the fields. (It is never NOT windy along I-90 across southern MN in the winter.)
Iowa uses salt, mostly. Illinois, I don't know what they use. IN and OH use a variety of different stuff. The Pennsylvania Turnpike gets called the "Pennsylvania Saltpike" in the winter because it requires at least a gallon of washer fluid just to make it from Ohio to Breezewood.
Depending on where you're at, I've seen them spreading salt, saltwater, cinders, sand, some kind of tan-colored stuff, and one time on the Ohio Turnpike I saw them spreading BLUE PELLETS. I tried to figure out what it was, and called my dad and had him do a google search and he was only finding conspiracy theory sites suggesting it was "Prussian Blue", which is a form of cyanide. I seriously doubt they would spread cyanide on the roads. In some areas they run a sprayer on the interstate, spraying some kind of liquid, most likely saltwater, just because snow is in the forecast.
In November of 2006 I was issued a brand new, $100,000 Volvo 670 model tractor. The truck was BRAND NEW. Unlike 4 wheelers, the frames on 18 wheelers are painted at the factory. And they use good paint.
By January 2007, after only 2 months of going back and forth from the midwest and the east coast, and one snow & ice-filled adventure over the rockies to Seattle and back, I was in the wash bay washing the truck and noticed surface rust on the paint around the bolts on the truck's frame.
By summer there was paint chipping and flaking off of the bolts that hold a frame crossmember in place. There's a socket on the back of the cab where the light cord plugs in, that never gets un-plugged because we only disconnect it regularly at the trailer end. The electrodes had been coated liberally with that white di-electric grease stuff when the truck was new. But there was corrosion in there and it had to be rewired to keep the trailer lights working.
That stuff they put on the roads is TERRIBLY corrosive and I suspect that since they seem to have fewer rust AND snow-related accident problems in the northern states like ND, MT and WA, where they have MORE snow, but don't use salt, ... there's got to be some kind of scam going on.
The great lakes region is also where GM, Ford and Chrysler have their roots. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan all have a vested interest in keeping their automotive industries going. So I think they probably put this super-corrosive stuff on the roads just to sell more cars, in states where the big automakers have political influence.
That's just my half-assed theory anyway. I'm not even wearing my tinfoil hat today.
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