Every year, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has to hire dozens of seasonal workers to drive plows and operate heavy machinery to keep the roads clear once the snow starts flying. This winter, they have a special group of people in mind to fill 60 vacant positions: veterans.
“Veterans often finish their military service with the types of skills we’re looking for,” CDOT deputy executive director Scot Cuthbertson tells CBS Denver in a statement. “We encourage veterans to make appointments and talk to us about our seasonal openings. We think we may have some good matches out there.”
CDOT held three open houses just for veterans to answer questions and make hires — including snowplow drivers, heavy equipment mechanics and communications experts — before Colorado’s heavy snow season hits.
This winter, you may have an extra reason to thank a veteran.
MORE: ‘Beet’ing the Icy Streets: Cities Thaw with This Unusual Concoction
Tag: snow
Drinking More Vodka: A Green Solution to Melting Icy Roads?
It’s a whole new meaning to vodka on the rocks. Aside from giving you a mean hangover, turns out that the clear spirit is pretty effective at melting snow.
As Phys.org reports, Washington State University (WSU) researchers developed a de-icer that’s made of barley residue from vodka distilleries. (The science makes sense for anyone who’s ever noticed that vodka never seems to freeze, even when you put a bottle in the freezer.)
The innovation is being touted as a greener alternative to rock salt, which is not only expensive (the U.S. uses 20 million tons of salt every winter, which costs $2.3 billion annually), but also carries environmental costs. Chemicals in the traditional road salt mixture have been known to seep into nearby streams and rivers, harming aquatic life and contaminating our drinking water.
MORE: The Simple Change to Traffic Lanes That Will Make Our Streets Safer
“In 2013, the [Environmental Protection Agency] reported alarming levels of sodium and chloride in groundwater along the East Coast,” Xianming Shi, associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, says in a press release from WSU. As a nation, “we are kind of salt addicted, like with petroleum, as it’s been so cheap and convenient for the last 50 years.”
Actually, in recent years, salt prices have only been going up. Cities that are experiencing usually harsh winters due to climate change have had to work extra hard to de-ice their roads, which has led to national road-salt shortages and higher prices.
WSU’s product, as Vice notes, is blended with salt but reduces the amount of salt that’s regularly needed to melt snow, and also makes use of a byproduct that would’ve been thrown out by vodka producers anyway.
Besides vodka byproducts, innovators have had success with other seemingly kooky low-sodium solutions, from beet juice to cheese brine. In Wisconsin (a state with no shortage of cheese or ice), Polk County officials estimated that they saved almost $40,000 in rock salt costs in 2009, the year they started using cheese brine on the highways.
DON’T MISS: Wisconsin Has a Seriously Cheesy Way to Melt Its Snow and Ice
How All These Snowstorms Could Make for Better Roads and Cities
Public planners studying street traffic patterns have long known that the wider the street, the more likely drivers are to speed and drive recklessly. This winter, many of them are tweeting photos of the patterns cars have left in the snow, revealing spaces where sidewalks could be widened, making it easier for pedestrians to cross the street and enhancing driver safety. The patterns are called “sneckdowns”—a combination of the words “snowy” and “neckdowns,” curb extensions that can calm traffic.
The piles of snow are keeping drivers from attempting aggressive passing maneuvers, just as wider sidewalks would if they were built. Planners in favor of these curb extensions point to the photos to show that drivers aren’t using these swaths of street anyway, so why not widen the sidewalk there? In other words, these annoying snowstorms are creating a free way to study traffic patterns to guide future street planning.
Philadelphia has already implemented this idea, widening sidewalks based on snow patterns in 2011. Prema Gupta, the director of planning for Philly’s University City District, told Angie Schmitt of Streetsblog USA that snow pattern photos “quickly made the case that there’s right-sizing to do here. For us it was just a really compelling way of showing there was way too much street and not nearly enough place for people.” So these relentless snowstorms that have made much of the country difficult to traverse this winter just might help everyone’s commute become easier in the future.
MORE: Here’s A Simple Way to Get Your Community Interested in Better Bike Lanes
Meet the Amazing People Who Are Making Atlanta’s Awful Snowstorm Less Awful
It seemed like the apocalypse had arrived in Atlanta after a few inches of snow left thousands stranded on highways without food or water. Children were stuck in school buses, a baby was born in highway traffic during the gridlock and some folks had to completely abandon their cars and walk for miles in freezing temps to find shelter. But no disaster is without its heroes.
Several schools, restaurants and companies like Home Depot and Kroger opened their doors for people to stay overnight. Michelle Sollicito, a Web-savvy good Samaritan, started the SnowedOutAtlanta Facebook page, a resource for people to get in touch with volunteers who wanted to help. The page’s crowdsourcing map allowed stranded motorists to find nearby shelters. More than 52,000 people have joined Sollicito’s service to get through the storm.
And if you want something that will really melt your heart, stop by the page’s spinoff, The Heroes of Snowed In Atlanta, which collects stories and photos of the city’s biggest helpers. Take Matthew Miller, who stood on I-75 to hand out PB&Js, cereal and hot chocolate to stranded motorists. Another local, James Thomason, used his pickup to pull cars out of ditches and take drivers home. It’s people like that who remind us that together we can get through even the worst storms.
MORE: It Started as a Winter Chore. Then It Turned Into a Movement
Wisconsin Has a Seriously Cheesy Idea. And It’s Going to Save the State a Fortune
A couple of facts most people know about Wisconsin: it’s got a lot of snow and a lot of cheese. So it was just a matter of time before the two things would converge. In Milwaukee, which averages about 50 in. of snow each winter, a pilot program now has workers spreading cheese brine — a superabundant byproduct of the cheese-making process — on icy roadways. The idea is to combine the salty liquid with traditional rock salt to thaw frozen roads; the brine helps rock salt stick, leading to less salt bouncing or washing off roads, and ultimately shrinking costs and reducing pollution.
MORE: Wisconsin’s other upcycling breakthrough: a hydroelectric renaissance.
Granted, it’s a mildly stinky solution, but it’s already proven successful in some of the state’s smaller localities. In Polk County, near Wisconsin’s northwest border, officials estimate that they saved almost $40,000 in rock salt costs in 2009, the year they started using cheese brine on the highways. Recycling the dairy waste also reduces the costs of hauling it and processing it at waste-treatment plants — huge expenses, considering that Wisconsin produced 2.7 billion lbs. of cheese in 2012. So far, no one’s complained about any scent of mozzarella or provolone on the ground, though it would seem a small price to pay for a state of proud cheeseheads.
How Shoveling a Little Snow Is Doing Big Things to Make This Community Better
A winter wonderland can be a beautiful backdrop for the holiday season. But when it snows, ‘tis also the season for major issues of senior safety across the nation. As the temperature falls, injury risk for older people climbs. Joseph Porcelli’s Boston Snow Crew fights back against a big piece of that risk by using online tools to connect older, ill, and disabled people with volunteers to shovel their walkways and driveways. Porcelli’s idea started as a local project but quickly spread into a far-ranging network, and the effort to make safety a little bit easier has turned into a major community-building initiative. Neighbors who were strangers are now better connected, building “extremely profound relationships on both sides of the equation,” as one leader reports. “What’s so nice about it is that it’s easy,” said one participant. “When you make it easy for people to do the right thing, things get done.”