Highway Superintendents – Heroes Or Goats?

by Alex Brooks
This is the time of year when people complain about their Town Highway Superintendent. When we get a blizzard in the winter and the highway crews plow us out, they are heroes. When a summer mega-rainstorm washes out a road and the highway crew rebuilds it, they are heroes. But when the snow melts and the spring wind starts blowing up dust from sand left on paved roads, and the spring thaw cycles leave dirt roads soft and muddy, highway superintendents come in for criticism.
[private]About these issues a number of our local highway superintendents agreed that salt on a dirt road makes it muddier whenever conditions are wet and especially at the time of the spring thaw. Louis Schmigel, Town of Hoosick Highway Superintendent said, “You can melt frost with salt.”
The crux of the problem is that a paved road should be treated differently from a dirt road. If one uses only salt on a paved road, it dissolves and washes away in the spring rains, leaving the road clean. But, ideally, no salt should be applied to dirt roads, because salt holds water and inhibits the road from drying out.
Jim Winn, Highway Superintendent in Berlin, agreed that salt makes the roads muddier in the spring or during wintertime thaws. He said he does not ever use salt on the dirt roads in Berlin. He loads his big plow trucks with winter sand. In icy times or muddy times he mixes crushed stone in with the sand because it helps with traction in icy times and it stabilizes the road in muddy times.
Berlin has just 20 miles of paved roads. Winn puts salt only in his pickup truck and salts the paved roads with that.
Louis Schmigel, in Hoosick, has a different situation since 85-90% of the roads he treats are paved. He said he would love to run separate trucks for paved roads and dirt roads but doing that would increase costs and take longer to get everyone plowed out because the trucks would have to travel more miles.
He said it is more art than science getting the right mixture on to the right roads. He has one truck that loads only sand and uses no salt because it does the western section of the Town where its whole route is dirt roads. The rest of the trucks use a salt-sand mixture, but they are able to load the trucks in such a way that there is more salt in the mix on the paved roads and less salt on the dirt roads. Schmigel credits former Hoosick Highway Superintendent Bill Shiland with devising routes in which the first section is all paved road and the last section is dirt road. The routes are too long to do on one load of sand so the trucks have to come back to refill anyway, and they can load with less salt on the second time out. Schmigel also said you can load a truck so that the salt will come out mostly on the first half of the run and be almost all sand on the latter part of the run.
Highway Superintendent  Herb Hasbrouck in Grafton agreed that too much salt can make a road muddy and soft. But he said it is not feasible for his crew to do separate runs for paved roads and dirt roads. He uses a mix of salt and sand in all the trucks and mixes in more “peastone” in the spring to strengthen the roads.
Steven Harrison, Deputy Highway Superintendent in Petersburgh, said their crew never puts salt on dirt roads. The sand they use does have some salt in it but not very much – just enough to keep the sand pile from freezing up solid, but they sometimes have to put sand on paved roads, he said. One reason is that when they need to get roads cleared in a hurry, like when they are clearing off the school bus runs before the buses get there, they don’t have time to go back to the yard and change material so they sand both paved and dirt sections. Also, he points out that when it’s very cold, the salt won’t clear the road so it’s necessary to sand it. Petersburgh has been keeping a supply of washed sand from Dailey’s for use on paved roads because there have been complaints about dust from sand left on paved roads. The washed sand has less fines in it so it makes less dust in the spring time.
Harrison said they sometimes put only salt in the F450 pickup truck and salt the paved roads with that, just as Winn does in Berlin.
Stephentown Highway Superintendent Alden Goodermote was sick this week, so he was not able to comment for this story.
More Complicated Than First Thought
It is clear that there are a lot of considerations involved in the  decisions that highway superintendents make, and it is not as simple as one might suppose. All of the superintendents shied away from speaking in absolutes; they don’t like to say they always do this or they never do that because the bottom line is that they have to make the roads safe as quickly as possible after a wide variety of weather events, and they sometimes have to improvise. Crazy weather conditions, finances, the materials and equipment available, the manpower available and a variety of other factors affect their operations.[/private]