24 tons of salt used to de-ice streets last week

One of our readers emailed asking if we could find out how the City treated the streets following the recent ice episode. His observation was that the primary streets were salted, but he couldn’t see much evidence that secondary streets were addressed, including his own. We spoke yesterday with Public Works Director Pete Tepe, and here’s what he told us.

Standard operating procedure is to salt the main roads and overpasses first and then the side streets and deadends. As for the latter, salt doesn’t do its job chemically when the ice is thick and there’s insufficient vehicle traffic to mix it up. Many of the side streets were treated, but unfortunately, the smaller truck was out of service so that narrowest streets weren’t salted. Still, Public Works managed to use roughly 24 of the 75 tons of salt on hand.