Seattle Stupidity Revisited

It seems that the Mayor of Seattle has had second thoughts about the no-salt added policy pursued by the City while claiming that the ecological effects of adding salt to the roads would harm the salt-water of Puget Sound.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced this morning that the city will reverse its decade-old policy and use road salt to melt ice in future storms.

The mayor set certain conditions for using salt: on hills, arterials or snow bus routes, and on routes to hospitals and other emergency facilities when at least 4 inches of snow is predicted, if ice is predicted, or if extreme cold is expected to last more than three days.

The city earlier refused to use salt, saying it's bad for the environment, and instead spread sand over the roads.

"In normal Seattle winters, this practice has served us well," Nickels said in a City Hall news conference today. "This time, liquid de-icers were not enough. People were frustrated, and so was I."

Nickels has faced criticism over the city's reaction to back-to-back snowstorms over the past two weeks. Buses could not run in many parts of the city and roads remained icy and rutted days after snow had fallen.

I guess the Mayor probably saw the bad public relations nightmare that ensued, to say nothing of the possible serious hit from lawsuits as a result of law enforcement being unable to reach people during emergencies in a timely fashion or the numerous auto accidents that resulted from roads that were worse than ice skating rinks because they were on hills.

Nothing is so clarifying as watching the potential for lawsuits pile up, and the city grind to a halt because of a snowstorm.

Of course, there are limitations to common sense:

The mayor set certain conditions for using salt: on hills, arterials or snow bus routes, and on routes to hospitals and other emergency facilities when at least 4 inches of snow is predicted, if ice is predicted, or if extreme cold is expected to last more than three days.

Making sure that hills are treated along with arterials and snow-bus routes is common sense, but requiring that four inches of snow fall before salt is used makes no sense. It doesn't take four inches of snow to cause problems. It can be as little as an inch - because it's the freezing of water that causes ice and turns roads into hazardous ice skating rinks.

HT: Ace