Salt is cure for icy winter roads, Aurora says

YorkRegion.com
Oct. 30, 2015
Lisa Queen

Pass the salt.

Aurora has decided sand is out, salt is in.

The town won’t use sand on its roads beginning this winter, opting instead to use salt to help keep drivers safe.

Currently, the town is using straight salt on primary roads and a mixture of 90 per cent sand and 10 per cent salt on secondary roads.

“We’re not going to be using sand on the roads any more. So, the sand will be eliminated for the roads that were getting sanded last year,” Ilmar Simanovskis, director of infrastructure and environmental services director, said yesterday.

“From an efficiency perspective, what we’re finding is that most municipalities now are shifting away from sand because it’s expensive from a life cycle perspective because you apply the sand, then you have to pick it back off the roads and then you have to dispose of it. And it’s not really effective as far as a safety product.”

Council also agreed to do all its street sweeping in-house rather than contracting out the service at Tuesday night’s meeting.

“The community’s difference will be that rather than taking, saying, two weeks to do the streets, we expect it will take a little longer but because we’re not using sand, there will be less of an impact on the community overall,” Simanovskis said.

The town will use a pre-treated salt rather than the untreated salt it has used in the past.

“The benefit of that is that is just performs a little better and doesn’t bounced off the road as much,” he said.

“Staff believe these changes are going to improve the service level and are also expected to reduce costs.”

The changes are expected to cost about $130,000 less a year. Last year, the town spent $1.4 million on its winter roads program.

Salt is 86 per cent more expensive than sand, Simanovskis’ nine-page report to council acknowledged.

But more sand is needed to make it effective and the clean up costs extra time and dollars.

Sand also travels through the storm water management system and into ponds, rivers and streams. The excess requires catch basins to be cleaned to remove any build-up of sand.

Salt has its drawbacks as well, Simanovskis said.

“Environment Canada has identified salt use as a hazard to the environment, however no suitable alternative to road safety management is available,” he said.

The town will use 56 per cent more salt due to the changes.

“However, when considering the overall impacts of sand application such as entry into storm sewers, dust generation, impact in private properties, collection and disposal costs and land fill capacity use, there are environmental benefits to avoiding sand use, both in energy for equipment operations and impact on the local environments.” Simanovskis said.