Norwalk looking into safety of road brine

NORWALK, Conn. – Norwalk has suspended its practice of pre-treating its roads with brine before snowstorms pending an investigation into whether the treatment Wednesday played a part in a spate of auto accidents, including one in which a driver was pronounced dead.

Mayor Harry W. Rilling announced the program suspension Thursday at a noon press conference.
Rilling took action after a newspaper’s speculation about the brine’s possible role in the crashes.

“I wanted to make sure we did everything possible to investigate this situation,” Rilling said during the news conference in City Hall.

Under the front page headline “Pre-treated roads to blame for accidents?”, The Hour on Thursday wondered whether the application of liquid brine before an anticipated snowstorm Wednesday led to any of the 14 accidents reported throughout the day.

The story was not based on any complaint about the treatment and did not cite any occurrence of such a problem ever happening or being investigated. Nonetheless, Rilling said the story presented what could be a liability for the city, necessitating suspension of the treatment, which the city has used for several years to prevent icing on pavement.

Rilling said he also ordered Hal Alvord, the director of the Department of Public Works, to conduct skid and brake tests on pavement with the brine solution applied, and those were performed Thursday morning at Calf Pasture Beach Park in East Norwalk.

The city’s highway superintendent, Chris Torre, and Norwalk Police Lt. Paul Vinett, who also attended the news conference, operated the vehicles in the tests.

“I drove on both treated surface and non-treated surface and there was a difference, but a minor difference. It was not significant,” Vinett said. “I was trying to make the car lose control and I was able to maintain control at all times.”

Vinett said the most significant difference was “going from a stop and accelerating too fast. If I accelerated too fast, the tires would spin but the car remained in my control.”

Alvord said an attempt was made during the tests to match the conditions that existed at the time roads were pre-treated on Wednesday.

He said in years past his department occasionally got a call that a driver experienced slipping on a treated road. He attributed this to someone driving close behind a truck streaming the treatment or traveling on a road before the treatment had dried, and compared it to driving in the rain.

He noted, however, that the solution is not applied as a sheet that covers a road’s surface, but instead as several thin streams that leave narrow stripes on the pavement.

Video recordings of the tests were made and will be saved, Rilling said, along with measurements of how the solution was applied, which were automatically generated by equipment in the truck as it applied the brine onto the road.

Vinett said that, based on police officers’ accident report narratives, 10 of Wednesday’s accidents may have been related to pre-treating roads. Rilling said all of Wednesday’s accident reports were being reviewed by Deputy Chief David Wrinn.

Alvord said the brine solution the city uses is specifically formulated for Norwalk based on research his department conducted into the pre-treatment of roads before winter storms. He said the state Department of Transportation and other municipalities were consulted about the process, including rates of application based on pavement temperature.

Kevin Nursick, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said Thursday the state also pre-treats roads with a brine solution, and his department has never received a report of a vehicle sliding on it. He noted, however, that the state only applies it when the pavement temperature is above 32 degrees.

Nursick said the state’s solution, which it mixes itself, contains only salt (25 percent) and water (75 percent). He said the water quickly evaporates and the salt forms into small crystals “that get into the nooks and crannies” of the pavement.

Alvord did not respond to an email asking what the city’s brine solution contains.

Nursick said the state began using the solution seven or eight years ago. Before that, it dropped rock salt on the road which, he said, car tires kick up and throw off the road’s surface, limiting its effectiveness.

After it has begun snowing, Nursick said, the state applies a mixture of rock salt and liquid magnesium to the roads, which causes melting even when the temperature drops down to the single digits.

While use of the brine is suspended, the city will pre-treat the roads with rock salt, Alvord said.

Rilling said the city may have the answer to the brine’s safety within the next couple of days, and will resume using it if it’s found safe.

“We don’t want to make the roads any less safe,” he said, “and if the brine proves to be the best way to make the roads safe, we’ll do that as well.”