OT - Winter Traction

Obsolete, sort of

Jason Roehl in Lafayette, IN

There are reasons most municipalities now have steered away from using sand. For one, there is much more infrastructure in place to get salt from the mines to the roads, making it a cheaper option than it used to be. More importantly, though, sand is essentially considered a pollutant when it's on roads. It does provide traction on top of ice, but once that ice is gone, it has the reverse effect--making them slick, particularly for motorcycles. Also, it washes into storm and sanitary sewers, but doesn't readily pass through them, clogging them up, or even clogging ditches, streams and rivers.

Jason

Re: Obsolete, sort of

Kevin French

Out here in the country, we use LOTS of sand on the roads. It's mixed with some salt but mostly sand. In the spring the town uses a street sweeper to remove a lot of it.

Same here

Re: Obsolete, sort of

Bruce, a MN Galoot

Municipalities and counties use sand, mixed with salt, particularly at intersections. I also ride motorcycle, but I won’t ride in the spring until the roads have been swept, at the least, or washed clean by rain. Motorcycle riders have died from sand on the roads.

Re: Obsolete, sort of

Dick Hines

Virginia is using a liquid on the roads. It will eat you truck or car up!! If I run up on them while they are spraying, if you can turn around. If I have to go through it I will run my truck through as soon as I can.

Re: Obsolete, sort of

Tom Dunlap

Minnesota DOT does continuous research on solutions for winter traction.

Brines of various 'salts' and crystallized forms of them mixed with sand are being used.

Having a jug of ballast/traction isn't a bad idea for travel above the Snow Belt.

Re: OT - Winter Traction

GolfSteve in Calgary

Hi Don - this is good idea as a way to get yourself unstuck. Sand may be obsolete as the way cities deal with road networks, but that doesn't help poor old Don when he's parked on a snow covered icy patch and he can't get out. A small milk container of sand may not be enough - when I needed to get unstuck I would usually need to use half of a 20 lb bag of sand. Bags of sand/gravel are still sold by the Scouts at most gas stations.

When I drove rear wheel drive cars or trucks I always had a bag of sand in the trunk to get me out of trouble - sand/gravel mix is better. For trucks I had 5-6 bags of sand to provide extra weight; that old 1977 Ford F100 rear wheel drive truck was useless on icy roads.

I never liked carrying around bags of salt (e.g. water softener salt) because they eventually leak and I worried about corrosion, but salt pellets would also provide physical traction and melt ice.

Since front wheel drive cars have become prevalent - and now all wheel drive - combined with winter tires and less country driving I never get stuck anymore - or I'm a smarter driver :0 so I don't bother with the bags of sand.

I still carry a shovel in the trunk to dig people out when needed, but I haven't used it in 15 years. I also carry a sleeping bag (I got stranded one winter night and had to sleep in the car), winter clothing, candles, matches, leather gloves (for removing hot radiator caps), rubber gloves (to keep my hands clean when working on the engine), a basic toolkit, a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher, an air pump, and emergency cash hidden by the tire jack.

Re: Obsolete, sort of

Bruce, a MN Galoot

I usually get a half dozen bags of water softener salt to carry in the bed of my truck. A pickup in 2WD isn’t much good in the winter here.

Re: OT - Winter Traction

Jack Guzman from Maine

Here in southern maine sand and salt are used everywhere. Locally they buy the salt in the fall and mix it with sand at the local sand pit. Local residents can help themselves for personal use. I always keep a couple five gallon drywall compound jugs handy for the driveway. When it is particularly slippery I will keep a bucketful in my truck. In the spring the snapping turtles lay their eggs in the sand along the road edges left from the winter sanding. I'm not sure how the salt affects the eggs.I imagine most of the salt has washed away.

Beet juice

Dick Coers

Many states use a beet juice/brine mixture to fight icy conditions. The beet juice lowers the working temperature limit of the solution. There is also becoming a world wide shortage of good quality sand. The kind of sand that is used in concrete. Not sure if that plays into the equation or not.

Really?

John in NM

A shortage of sand? Aggregate products are usually so cheap and plentiful that it doesn't pay to move them further than a couple hundred miles (out here at least).

The kind of sand in short supplys is....

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

sand for hydraulic fracturing.

Re: Really? *LINK*

Dick Coers

The sand used for concrete.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4274233/world-running-out-of-sand-black-market/


https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-sand-shortage

Re: Really?

John K Jordan

Here they use what the highway dept calls "chips", fairly finely crushed rock. They spread it on top the snow both times it snows each year, usually no more than an inch or so. It really adds traction on the ice, always there in the morning since the snow usually starts melting right away. (Far slipperier than the snow on the road in western PA where I learned to drive.)

Ballast is good, but...

Kevin French

If its in the back on a front wheel drive car is it all that effective?

Not the whole story

John in NM

Aggregate is a commodity with place value. There is plenty of good quality sand here in the southwest, but less demand for it since there is not a huge amount of building going on, so it has relatively low value here. Where demand is high and supply low, it is more expensive.

Sand brought from thousands of miles away is no longer cheap.

You can crush rocks to make sand, nice angular sand, but that is a very expensive way of doing it.

None of this means "we're running out of sand", as both articles state - it means sand is becoming more expensive than we like.

Re: Not the whole story

Barry Irby

Sand is where you find it. The location often determines the quality or characteristics. Beach sand is often little rounded particles. The smoothing and rounded caused be being tumbles endlessly by the waves. This sand is not good for mortar or cement.

Rivers bring rock and sand down from the mountains. As the slope lessens and the rivers slow down, the particles settle out. The rocks get left behind and later the course sand and then the finer stuff. Deltas are created this way. Petersburg, VA was known for this. Way back they discovered the sand in the rivers around Petersburg was excellent for mortar and concrete. They did not know how to scientifically select it but they knew where the good stuff came from. So, many years ago Architects and Engineers would specify Petersburg Sand. As a result, the rivers around here a full of giant pits where they dredged out the sand. Not much of that activity any more. Now they go in a dump all kinds of crap into the pits and fill them, but not all the way. They put a layer of good stuff on top and leave the area just under water. Instant wetlands. A whole new set of fortunes are being made.

My son works for a company that sells "Environmental" materials around Northern Virginia. Much of the aggregate is not reprocessed concrete. Then strip it out, Crush it, sort it and use it again. They very carefully blend material to make top soil. Part of the process if running some of it through a giant rotary kiln. They are working with scientists, engineers and university professors. A very high tech approach to dirt. Some of their products are the materials for ball fields. Anyone need a pitchers mound? I can hook you up.

Ironically...

John in NM

That rounded sand has an application requiring much more strict constraints than does masonry sand - it is very useful in any application that requires maximum water flow, such as packing around well casings in the screened area where the water infiltrates the casing. Though I don't know a lot about the details of hydraulic fracturing, I would bet that well rounded sand is desirable for that as well.

Out here there is so much sand and gravel that it doesn't pay to move it more than a few hundred miles if that far. Across much of the southwest there are large mountain ranges of mostly granitic/andesitic rock or their metamorphic counterparts, and large, deep basins in between that are filled with sand/gravel alluvium from the mountains. Few rivers run year round, so keeping the water out of the gravel pit is not so tricky.

The mountain ranges in the east are much older, and formed by a mechanism that did not produce vast basins to fill with gravel. Add to that the abundant rainfall and vegetation and many of the minerals making up sand and gravel break down into clay.

I remember when I first moved to Tucson I was learning to gold pan in my back yard. I was amazed to find both red garnet and magnetite, miles from the mountains. There was a guy who taught knife making & blacksmithing at the community college, he would occasionally collect enough magnetite from one of the dry river beds to smelt into iron and make something. I never got to see that but it sounded like a cool, if very inefficient, demonstration of where stuff comes from.

Where I live now is right on the edge of the basin & range, so most of the rock here is limestone & sandstone that sits on top of the granitic stuff that is exposed further west. It pays to truck aggregate a bit farther around here, since limestone makes lousy concrete - it needs silica for strength.

Re: Ballast is good, but...

Bill Howatt

Ballast is one of those things that can be beneficial but you have to be careful. For example, loading up the back end of a rear-wheel drive car or truck increases the traction but can act like a giant pendulum if the back wheels loose traction on a corner.

Many experts will tell you to put snow tires on the back of a FWD drive car instead of the front if you are only installing 2 snow tires to minimize fish-tailing, spins. For this reason adding ballast could help unless you run afoul of what I said in the first paragraph.

I live in a cold, snowy area and always run with 4 snow tires in the winter on my FWD Dodge mini-van.

On sand: I can buy bags of sand at the local hardware store but it is really for concrete or mortar mixing and is too fine to be real effective. On real cold hard ice it doesn't bite into the ice but is better than nothing. I often let the sand the road people put down in front of my house dry out well (or it turns into a frozen rock when you want to use) and then sweep up a few buckets and put in the garage for the next winter. It is much coarser.

Bill

an example of why I quit listening to npr

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Funded by the crisis center. If you can't find one make one. And investigate it with a reporter ignorant of the technology of the topic.

Sand for glass requires a silica largely free of iron impurities. This sand is typically derived from largely iron-free sandstone. There is a whole mountain chain of this source here in E.TN. Glass plants will be located near other such sources.

Silica for quartz lamp covers and solid state devices requires even more pure quartz source, typically crystalized quartz in pegmatite deposits, for example NC and Brazil, but there are hundreds worldwide.

Concrete is about 1 part cement, 4 parts rock of about any kind and 2 parts sand, by volume. By weight I suspect the sand percentage is lower. The reporter, probably a millennial that never mixed any, seems to not recognize that about any kind of rock makes up the most of concrete buildings and highways.

It may be that some countries or districts of countries are sand poor as a result of unfavorable geology. Do we in the US really need to fund a reporter to raise an alarm over this situation? California is blessed with glacial till valleys full of gravel from which sand can be readily derived. If there is a shortage of sand in CA it is due to environmental policy, not geology. If CA residents wish to put virtue signaling about sand policy before economic good sense that is not a worry for me in TN.

Sand for hydraulic fracturing requires a special sand and it is not common. But I doubt npr frets that hydraulic fracturing will be impeded by a sand shortage.

Sand...sand...everywhere, but not a grain to use

Tom Dunlap

Supply demand

Location...location...location

Right tool for the job

I'm pretty sure I heard the same NPR story. I found it interesting but not crisis mongering. Very educational...to me anyway. Transportation costs can change the cost dramatically.

Lots of materials have to be transported to areas where they don't exist. The Bread Basket in the US sure lacks lumber for building. The wooded Eastern US depends on the Bread Basket for food. Same issue with good sand.

What is a mystery to me is transporting food from around the world. Fresh produce 12 months a year...and reasonable quality, at times. I had $6/bottle Chilean wine for Thanksgiving. Minnesota wine...well..this isn't really wine country LOL!