MILWAUKEE COUNTY, Wis. — Some municipalities in Milwaukee County have been getting creative with how they approach salting their roads on a budget.
A few years ago, the city of Glendale purchased an old fire truck. Instead of using it to fight fires, the truck was converted in 2021 for use in de-icing the city’s roads.
City Mechanic Richard Neth said he added hoses and pumps that allow the fire truck to pour brine. Brine is a mixture of mostly water and some salt on the roads.
“It’s a great unit that is cost efficient and it helps us clear the roadway with less salt,” he said.
Neth said Glendale pays $80 for a ton of road salt
“We were originally purchasing about 1,600 tons a year,” said Neth. “We have now cut down to a 1,000 and I believe I could get that even lower.”
Other municipalities are also taking a more cost-effective approach to deal with snow.
Shane Albers is the operations superintendent in Bayside. He said they only needed to spend $20 to modify one of their trucks to de-ice roads.
That’s because they already had most of the materials on-hand.
“We ended up installing this spray bar that we had from another project we had used probably about a decade ago, and I had my mechanic go to a local hardware store and they bought a $20 on/off sprinkler valve,” said Albers.
Similar to Bayside, River Hills spent about under a thousand dollars to modify one of their trucks to pour brine on roads and sidewalks.
Head mechanic Patrick Rigden said it has made a difference.
“We have a lot of turns and a lot of valleys that will hold the ice and snow and so the brine helps us pick it up when we go and plow and go down to a cleaner road faster and it also adds some traction for some residents that are moving around that aren’t in high traffic area,” said Rigden.
Neth said seminars from Wisconsin Salt Wise have been a vital resource for transitioning to this approach. It’s a statewide organization that works to reduce salt pollution in local waterways.
“Someone that was willing to salt a lot and seeing what it does to the environment kind of hit home,” said Neth. “It was like ‘I would like to drink my tap water and not have it be salty.’”
That’s why he will continue to work on reducing the amount of road salt needed to clear roads in Glendale.