Less salt, better roads: East Gwillimbury uses new solution for winter

'Sunny in Holland Landing, snowing in Mount Albert'

Yorkregion.com
March 12, 2019
Amanda Persico

Winter maintenance is much more than plowing snow and throwing salt.
For East Gwillimbury, it’s primarily about road safety.

Winter operations go from November to the end of March, from pre-winter treatment to spring cleanup and street sweeping and all the snowy days in between.

And oh, have there been plenty of snowy days.

Depending on which side of the snowbank you stand, the 2018-19 winter was either a humdinger or bust with 58 snow events as of March 6, 2019, which is tied to a $2.19 million budget.

That’s above the town’s ‘typical’ winter with about 52 snow events in a season, said East Gwillimbury’s operations manager, Jeff Meggitt.

Winter maintenance is a “tough science," Meggitt said.

No one controls the weather and its unpredictability is a challenge for any municipality.
But East Gwillimbury is about 245 kilometres square, meaning different weather patterns in different parts of the town.

“It could be a sunny day in Holland Landing and snowing in Mount Albert,” he said.
While accumulation of snow is a factor in sending out the snow brigade, the main priority is road safety.

Town staff are out patrolling the roads monitoring road conditions, measuring temperatures at the Holland Landing weather station and keeping tabs on a town with specific weather forecasts that are issued four times a day.

“Our goal is to make sure roads are safe for the morning and afternoon rush hours,” Meggitt added. “We respond the same, whether it is 2 cm or 10 cm.”

Plowing priorities for roads include traffic volumes, wide bends or curves in a road, hills and school and bus routes.

The trick to getting bare pavement is moving ahead of the storm.

And that means anti-icing instead of de-icing – pre-treating roads with a solution to prevent ice from forming instead of tossing salt in hopes of melting an already slippery surface.

The town uses a liquid salt solution similar to a brine, which is part of the town’s overall salt reduction strategy.

The saline solution, which is 23 per cent salt, is sprayed on roadways about 24 hours prior to an impending storm, Meggitt said.

While salt is one of the best options of melting ice, using too much can wreak havoc on our waterways, said David Lembcke, environmental sciences manager with the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority.

“It’s hard to compete with salt. It’s easy to get and it’s effective,” he said. “But we can be savvy in the way we mix it or use it.”

About 100,000 tonnes of salt end up in Lake Simcoe each year, Lembcke said.
That could have long-term impacts on the health of the watershed like a “pack-a-day smoker,” he added.

The issue is not about removing salt from winter maintenance routines, but more about finding the right balance.

“Too much can tip the balance for many water species,” Lembcke said, referencing saltwater blue crabs found in Toronto creeks years ago.

Liquid salt is a way of doing more with less salt.

Another way to help limit the use of salt is to lower expectations when it comes to how fast roads are cleared.

“We’re in Canada, winter does happen. We need to change our perspective,” Lembcke said. “We can’t expect to travel as freely in winter as we do in summer.”