We got the beet! 7 facts about beet juice on highways

You don't have to work for the Kansas Department of Transportation to know we use beet juice to help battle ice on highways during the winter.

But could you pass a pop quiz on it? Do you know how to explain why KDOT crews use sugar beet juice to fight wintry road conditions? 

Think of it this way: The sugar in sugar beet juice offers sweet benefits for ice-fighting efforts on the highways, especially when pre-treating trouble areas like bridges, which tend to ice up faster than non-elevated pavement. There’s a chemistry at work, says Jim Frye, Field Maintenance Manager/Emergency Coordinator with KDOT.

Frye recently gave beet and brine application training to south central Kansas snow-and-ice crews in Larned and Wichita. 

Jim Frye talks with District Five employees during beet/brine application training on Jan. 14 in Wichita.

Here are seven points -- and a little science lesson -- from the teacher that could help you pass the quiz and explain it to others:

• Beet juice added to brine (saltwater) is especially useful with temperatures from 15 down to 5 degrees. That’s because beet juice, as Frye says, “slows the process of water molecules forming into (ice) crystals. Come to find out, sugar helps the water molecules from freezing solid down in these lower temperatures. It keeps it slushy, which is what we want.”
  
• Because beet juice is sticky, it holds ice-fighting brine to pavement longer.
  
• Other advantages: By using a mix of beet and brine, it takes less brine, so it lowers the corrosive effect of the salt in brine – which helps cut down on road and bridge repair. It also reduces the amount of salt seeping into the environment.
  
• Does beet juice look brownish and get on vehicles? Yes, but it will wash off with water.
  
• KDOT uses beet juice to pretreat or treat highways at more than 20 locations around the state.
  
• KDOT has used beet juice for about five years now.
  
• The beet juice comes from an Iowa supplier. 

Remember that crews work hard to clear Kansas roads. Make sure you give them plenty of room to work, and check www.kandrive.org for updated road conditions. 

Innovative possible solution to icy problem

KDOT Mechanic Curtis Watts with the brine bar he crafted as part of a pilot project.

You could call it a salty solution to a big challenge: A pilot project to possibly modify KDOT plow trucks – at low cost – to efficiently treat Sedgwick County roads with brine so traffic can move safely in snow and ice.

The request came from David Lechner, Maintenance Superintendent for the Wichita Metro.

The innovative potential solution came from a veteran KDOT mechanic, Curtis Watts. He built it, with among other things, about $30 worth of PVC pipe and less than $8 in auto-parts-store exhaust clamps.

Lechner, one of Watts’ supervisors, put it this way: “To be able to pre-treat the whole town (Wichita metro) in a few hours is the whole goal. … Curtis put all this together.”

Ask Watts how he designed it, he says, “Just in my head.” The Equipment Mechanic Senior can draw on his 35 years of KDOT know-how.

The nozzles attach/detach with simple clamps.

KDOT gave him room to create. “We felt like we had the freedom to do whatever (was needed), and I just passed it on to Curtis,” Lechner said.

The idea was to build something workable at a lower cost than a manufacturer’s price.

The goal is to have the option to spread brine and salt on one truck. “With the new brine bars, we can treat Sedgwick County roads with brine and/or salt in half the time without any new major equipment purchases,” said Dave Bohnenblust, District Five Maintenance Engineer. “We also can switch from a brine treatment to a salt treatment or do both from the same truck.”

As far as spreading brine, “Why not use PVC?” the thought went. It’s inexpensive, easy to work with, easy to repair.

In a day, Watts crafted a brine spreader bar out of inch-and-a-half PVC, in a straight line that bends out at both capped ends to fully distribute the liquid. He drilled holes spaced for 12 nozzles. They spray down in a cone shape and angled out to the side, on the back of a truck. It treats two lanes in one pass. For nozzles, he used stainless steel ones used in agriculture and available online. The nozzles attach/detach with simple clamps. He picked standard auto exhaust pipe clamps to attach the bar.

Watts and his team also found a bigger pump to bring brine from 400-gallon saddle tanks on either side of the truck.

A button in the cab activates it all. Equipment Operator Senior Tim Kyle demonstrated the cold-weather system as others on the brine-bar team, including Shop Supervisor Shane Stubbs, watched at the Wichita area office.

The brine-bar set-up worked fine last winter, Watts noted. The brine bar has been installed on four trucks; three of the trucks are being equipped with other components to complete the system. And all four trucks will be rolling this winter, Lechner said.

As far as cost, the whole new brine-bar system comes to about $1,500 per vehicle, with the biggest portion going to the pump and electric valve. Watts gave an itemized breakdown in perfectly neat handwriting: $1,389.35 plus PVC, fittings and hoses, for the total of around $1,500, which seemed to be a relatively low-cost addition to a $170,000 truck.

The new brine system can be used with salting and plowing and allows KDOT to treat more in less time, which is crucial for Wichita metro traffic flow, Lechner said.

KDOT’s Bureau of Maintenance has reviewed the brine bar pilot project, and with revisions it could be part of an improved system for treating roadways.

“This is just something we did to help our work situation” – and to protect motorists, Lechner said. “That’s our job.”

Movie magic: KDOT produces training video

Most of us aren’t thinking about snow and ice in August, but that’s what several KDOT employees had on their minds last summer as they filmed an educational video.

Retired Equipment Operator Specialist Miguel Padua, left, and Equipment Mechanic Senior Steve Schmidt mix brine.

August was pretty warm for making brine, but to help future KDOT employees learn how to do it, that’s exactly what Field Maintenance Manager Jim Frye had a crew do at the North/East Complex in Wichita.

Frye oversaw a training video about how to make salt brine. The video, when completed, will be featured on the Bureau of Maintenance’s page on KDOT’s intranet as part of employee training. Frye said recently that he thinks the video will be available soon to employees.

Retired Equipment Operator Specialist Miguel Padua loads salt to mix brine.

Bret Mathias, Media Production Technician in Support Services, shot the video with retired Equipment Operator Specialist Miguel Padua, who worked in Wichita, and Equipment Mechanic Senior Steve Schmidt, who works in Salina.

Retired Equipment Operator Specialist Miguel Padua overlooks the machine that mixes brine. 

Padua and Schmidt made brine on camera to teach others the proper techniques to do so.

“This is something we have wanted to do for a while,” Frye said of this particular training video.

KDOT spends a lot of time training new Equipment Operator Trainees.

Districts across the state also offer “snowfighter training” to new crew members to help them learn the ins and outs of pre-treating and plowing roads.