Sisters puts down anti-icing agent

A City of Sisters utility truck sprays deicer at local intersections. photo by Tom Chace

The pickup truck came to a downtown stop sign. It crossed the line on Cascade Avenue and swerved into the oncoming traffic lane for 50 feet.

Then it pulled back into its own lane and proceeded to stop at the next intersection where it did the same thing all over again.

It was 6:30 in the morning on Saturday, November 15. It would have been suspicious behavior, except that this truck was being operated safely, with great caution and care. This was a City of Sisters utility truck, spraying a chemical deicing agent onto the local streets.

The truck sprayed near each stop sign, in each direction, to make safe driving for those about to go to work or coming from the residential areas into town.

The Oregon Department of Transportation, in a November 7 news release, told of the expanded use of a chemical product named FreezGard Zero on highways and byways in county areas away from Bend.

The use of deicers is common in Sisters.

"We've been doing this here in the city for years," said Eric Penhollow, a public utility worker and driver of the erratic truck.

Penhollow said that he or other city workers assigned to this job have to rise early during these cold winter mornings to check temperatures, and if the thermometer shows a freezing condition, they haul into the city yard and start the deicing truck.

"I sometimes get going near 5 in the morning if we have a good freeze in order to get the intersections ready for local traffic," he said.

Penhollow was driving a white city pickup truck with orange/yellow warning lights flashing above the cab.

In the rear, on the truck bed, was a tank with a hose connected to a spray rig near the rear bumper.

As the truck approached an intersection, Penhollow, from inside the cab, pulled a lever or pushed a button that released the liquid spray onto the road surface.

Very little of the liquid material is needed to melt the ice and prevent refreezing.

Penhollow carefully drove his truck in a checkerboard pattern on every street within the downtown area spraying each intersection so that the automobile traffic would have a grip on the pavement when braking.

Saturday was a morning when a slight drizzle overnight turned many streets into dangerous lanes of "black ice."

The product used for a deicer is generically magnesium chloride hexahydrate, labeled FreezGard Zero by ODOT.

It is an anti-icing agent or a fast-acting deicer, clearing streets and roadways of ice and working at temperatures as low as 25 degrees below zero.

With ODOT's expanded use of deicers, highways around Sisters will now get the treatment the City of Sisters has been using successfully on local streets.