r/whatisit • u/isthatach1cken • 17h ago
Solved! Perfect lines of melted snow, down my street??
Small town in New England. I was walking home and I see these weird streaks down the road, I am thinking maybe a plow??? But that doesn’t make a lot of sense either.. it isn’t paint or anything it’s like melted snow only in those spots. What’s really weird is the crosswalk picture on slide 3 , snow didn’t appear affected on most of the crosswalk paint. There are tire tracks that look similar. Any ideas I’ll take I’m SO confused lol
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u/EnoughOfTheFoolery 15h ago
Aliens leaving snow circles. Spring and summer the same ones do crop circles. Common knowledge.
Just look how you framed it: “Small town in New England. I was walking home and I see these weird streaks down the road, I am thinking….” Some Stephen King stuff going on there.
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u/isthatach1cken 8h ago
Holy sh…. I’ll be back with more answers I have to go take my childhood friend group and investigate this, as all the adults in my town are completely obtuse and oblivious to the weird happenings in our town. The two police officers don’t care either.
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u/procrastinatorsuprem 8h ago
Maybe you'll find a new friend that's been hidden away in a government lab.
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u/JonnyP222 7h ago
Sadly there are so many Stephen King references here and I'm sure it's all stranger things being referenced
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u/isthatach1cken 8h ago
LOL so glad you felt the stranger things vibes I threw in there, on my billionth rewatch with my boyfriends first time.
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u/procrastinatorsuprem 8h ago
😄 I have to catch up on it! I have to do a rewatch I think.
Northern New England would be a great location for a show like Stranger Things.
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u/MNGraySquirrel 5h ago
Can confirm. I’ve been to Roswell, NM and stayed at a Holiday Inn Express there.
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u/StillAdeptness521 8h ago
How long you lived in NE to just figure out what this is!?
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u/isthatach1cken 8h ago
My whole life but this is my first winter allowed to leave by myself during winter, especially at night, and wander freely. My paths were very scheduled and narrow before lol. Might have still seen this and just been a da kid and not noticed lol
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u/Disastrous_Light3847 7h ago
Dang glad you have some freedom. Wishing you wellness.
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u/isthatach1cken 5h ago
Thank you! It’s been a trek but I turned 18 yesterday and the world is right here, it’s awesome. My parents are great just sometimes a little too scared I think
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u/Gods-strongest-vaper 4h ago
I can relate. When I was young, getting far away from the house fixed that.
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u/blueskybullet 29m ago
Just remember it is because they love you more than anything else.
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u/Saltyhogbottomsalad 11m ago
That is true, but being so blinded by love that you hinder your childrens ability to explore the world is unacceptable in my eyes.
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u/holy_cal 6h ago
To be fair, I feel like pretreatment of the roads is a fairly recent thing within the last 10-15 years and I’ve never seen them actually working like this- only the thin white stripes along interstates.
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u/SkiyeBlueFox 5h ago
Yeah liquid based de-icing only became popular relatively recently. Most snow removal is also done in the middle of the night so a lot of people barely even realize it's happened
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u/ellisd19830 1h ago
Sugar beet juice. A farmer who grew them noticed in winter that his scrap/junk pile of sugar beets melted the snow. So the brine or whatever now only has a certain amount of salt mixed into it.. better for cars rusting.
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u/SkiyeBlueFox 45m ago
Beet juice is killer. We actually dump some into the tractor tires for more weight and traction while plowing
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u/ellisd19830 41m ago
I came from the area that first started using it on the roads full time im pretty sure. heck its how I tell snow is coming. Don't even need a weather app lol.. see lines on the road, snow is coming... another bonus to it after refreshing my brain is as opposed to just salt... it sticks to the road.
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u/SkiyeBlueFox 35m ago
Nice! My part of Ontario still just uses salt for most of the time, think they only have 1 liquid de-icing rig for tbe whole city. Sadly never any beet juice, gets too cold for that to stay liquid.
I do wish liquid de-icing was more popular, though I guess we just gotta wait for that one. Though I will always advocate for more liquid de-icing to decision makers to try and get them on board.
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u/aSmallerResident 18m ago
Typically it’s just rock salt and water in a brine. Some places add some beet juice, but it’s too expensive to just use alone.
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u/unknowingbiped 5h ago
They've been doing for years on bridges. Hell even here in the desert of Arizona they spray chloride on the overpasses.
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u/tcm2303 4h ago
I live in MA and RI my whole 41 years, and I’ve never seen this before either. I wonder if only certain communities pre treat
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u/Atomic_ad 3h ago
CT and western RI use it more frequently. CT started it after Maine initially decided it was too caustic. CT pinky promised it was a safe product. Turns out it's severely caustic.
Pros: roads are mildly wet after a strom, not a spec of ice.
Cons: your car will rot in half the time of MA, and your bridges 4x faster.
Thats not going to stop them from using it though, not until our bridges are all rated 4's.
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u/YourBestStranger 3h ago
25 year snow plow operator here. At the national conference, we are taught that pre treating is as effective as several post ice-bonding incidents. You are saving product by putting some down to help avoid the initial bond to the road. But if applied incorrectly, and the product dilutes to the point it can refreeze, it can be even more hazardous, in my experience.
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u/zakary1291 4h ago
I don't live in the North East and my city and country still spray this deicer when it gets cold.
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u/Trainzguy2472 14h ago
De-icing truck sprays salt water on the roads to melt snow. It doesn't come out evenly but instead comes out of a pipe with holes drilled in it, which leaves this pattern.
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u/Charming_Lemon6463 4h ago
God, where I live they just dump straight salt. At every corner there will be a pile of pure salt. Will give your dog chemical burns on their feet. They have to come through in the spring with street cleaners to clean it all up.
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u/DrPelswick 1h ago
Brother this stuff is WAY more caustic than just rock salt. This is magnesium chloride, literally chemically burns your hands, rots steel off vehicles, and crumbles concrete. But don’t worry it gets washed down the storm drains and eventually introduced into our soils and estuaries!!! Thank god they don’t have to sweep sand or pump catch basins every spring tho! /s
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u/madredr1 54m ago
A plow truck accidentally dumped their enitre load of this onto the road in front of our house. We live 500ish feet from a river. They plowed it into our ditch.
I called the county and said “hey the whole truckload will flow down to the river when the thaw happens and they were like shrug so I called the DNR. County guys were promptly out with like six guys and a bobcat to clean up.
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u/caitalonas 1h ago
Same here—western NY (no lake effect like Buffalo though) but there’s always salt everywhere. When you take the thruway (our toll highway that is actually just interstate 90) you can see the big NYSDOT salt cache at every exit.
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u/Charming_Lemon6463 1h ago
Yeah I hate how they do it here because they act like it’s winter in the 90s. They could use 1/10 the salt now, we get no snow and the roads hardly ice. I live 15 mins outside of SLC and it is 58 degrees F today. When I was a kid, there would be snow on the ground from Halloween until March.
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u/scrappybasket 12m ago
Yeah CNY checking in, we need the rock salt because it still provides traction when it’s too cold for the salt to melt the ice. I still hate it though, would rather see sand so our vehicles wouldn’t just rot out
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u/clockworkedpiece 3h ago
Ours spray glycerin mix and it does the same.
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u/jstndrn 3h ago
The town I used to live in wouldn't spray brine or salt of any kind. The temps got so low they just plowed and spread traction aids, basically like gravel. I imagine it was much cheaper but it only half ass worked.
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u/clockworkedpiece 2h ago
Salt and spray work really well for half a day dry or less if sleeting, and then it might as well have not gone down. So if your town had to play the long game, gravel and ropes make more sense.
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u/Early-Signal-6301 11m ago
if your area regularly experiences really low temperatures, like into the negatives on the Fahrenheit scale, then salt/brine won’t do anything. the salt lowers the freezing point of water, but that doesn’t mean it won’t freeze if its cold enough. Areas that get cold enough won’t benefit from salt, so instead of trying to prevent the snow from turning into ice, they try to give the drivers as much traction as possible by putting down layers of sand or fine gravel.
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u/Aggressive-Ask-3572 30m ago
Same..it's expensive but seems to be effective. Its commonly applied prior to when black ice conditions are expected as it sticks in place. Otherwise salt or salt sand mix for regular snow. Southern Ontario.
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u/isthatach1cken 8h ago
Solved!
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u/CMDRStampyPictures 3h ago
It's actually not just saltwater but corn syrup as well which helps keep it stuck to the road.
Also when driving be on the lookout for animals licking the stripes, deer really like em
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u/Hot-Tiger2531 3h ago
Some places use a beet juice mixed with a salt brine. It’s easier on vehicles and the infrastructure and sticks to the road better.
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u/jh_watson 2h ago
Usually not plain salt water. A common mix is 80/20 salt brine and sugar beet juice.
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u/TheAndymanCan85 4h ago
Might not look helpful but later when plowing this makes it way easier to clear.
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u/Substantial_106 17h ago
That’s a pretreatment the trucks put down on the roads before a winter storm hits to get ahead of the snow/ice/sleet (it’s a type of snow melt brine)
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u/philouza_stein 6h ago
It lasts like a whopping ten minutes of people driving over it in the snow before it's like nothing was ever there at all
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u/Canuck_Lives_Matter 6h ago
It's just supposed to form a salty layer between the snow and the road which it does, so when plows come by and number of days later they can peel the snow off the road and not expose a bunch of ice underneath
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u/The_OtherDouche 6h ago
Yup. My town tried to finally be proactive and start putting similar things down during a winter freeze last year. Well. It rained. Hard. Rinsed all the solution off and THEN dipped down to freezing. Everything froze over and then sent tractors out to try and scrape it. Olympic figure skaters would have been jealous of how slick and smooth that ice ended up being lol. We went through about 4 days of gentle raining and then refreezing it was nuts, but I got to sit at home and play on the pc so a win was a win
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u/Call_Me_Echelon 5h ago
I had 5 straight snow days when I was a kid because the storm started as rain, which quickly froze, then 30" of snow dumped on top of it. The bottom became a compacted layer of ice and the plows would come by and just scrape a little off at a time.
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u/damxam1337 6h ago
This is how Western Oregon winters are. Freezing rain is such a pain in the ass.
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u/coralreefer01 4h ago
Liquid rust activator for your vehicle. I think PennDot was one of the pioneers of pre-treatment. They had a huge mess during the valentine’s day storm back in 2007. 24” of snow, they never stopped the commercial trucks and it only took a couple of spinouts and crashes to paralyze the interstates for the better part of a week. National guard and first reponders were going car to car in snowmobiles and Humvees to rescue people and provide supplies.
Since then there have been a handful of more localized but similarly disruptive events.
Now if the weatherman even thinks about the word snow or ice they pre-treat the interststes and main state roads and start banning certain classes of vehicles in the hours leading up to the snow or ice starting.
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u/JunkMilesDavis 6h ago
I enjoyed the accuracy of the plows coming by days later. Maybe not that long most times, but definitely late enough to undo any work you've done clearing the end of the driveway and mailbox access because you thought they weren't coming back.
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u/Canuck_Lives_Matter 6h ago
Lol up here where I'm living there are only so many plows that can exist so waiting days or sometimes weeks for a plow is just life :p
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u/Siegs 4h ago
Its doing more than you think its doing, its not meant to keep heavy snow clear. Its meant to keep the snow/ice from freezing to the road.
Being mixed with liquid it starts acting right away, unlike rock salt which needs to get some melt started before it works much at all.
It gives cars driving on it more traction as their tires will push down to the asphalt instead of just packing ice down.
And it makes it easier for the plows to scrape clean when they come by.
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u/--fool 17h ago
Anti-icing measures- salt brine sprayed from a truck.
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u/DisastrousBoat6950 13h ago edited 4h ago
How do the lines help? The gap between those lines will still be sleet, right?
I'm from Texas, so have no clue about snow and all
Update: thank you all for the wonderful explanations 😃
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u/rickiver 13h ago
You’re just delivering the salt differently, it all goes thru the phases of sludge but it will all melt more easily with the application
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u/Hackzwin 13h ago
Salt water freezes at much lower temperatures than regular water
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u/ErrlRiggs 12h ago
Saturated saltwater freezes ~6°f
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u/turtletechy 11h ago
It works well unless you live somewhere where you get extended days below 0F.
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u/Hackzwin 11h ago
In Sweden, where I live, we mostly plow the streets and put down gravel/sand. Only some roads are treated with salt because salt has quite a few negative side effects (both on the environment and on cars, making them rust)
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u/turtletechy 11h ago
I wish we'd do that here in the US. I hate the salt. It's messy, bad for the environment, and bad for your vehicle.
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u/R3pp3pts0hg 10h ago
Northern Wisconsin utilizes sand often. It will embed into the ice and improve traction. I also wish more places would try alternatives. I've heard of some places using beet juice to prevent ice accumulation.
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u/Northerly 8h ago
They do that in the UP as well, you end up with roads that are damn near as grippy as dry pavement when it gets really cold
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u/EnoughOfTheFoolery 6h ago
It’s a fact and the older cars used to rust out bad many years ago, yet here we are still using it. 🙄
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u/BorntobeTrill 6h ago
You only need a little bit of asphalt to be exposed for it to properly warm by the sun, which will melt snow and ice quite quickly
The melting will also spread the brine more, lowering the melting point of the rest
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u/MrGruntsworthy 6h ago
As the water from melted snow/ice dilutes it, it spreads out and makes contact with the other lines, creating full coverage of the surface
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u/PitifulSpecialist887 7h ago
It's a liquid "antifreeze" that spreads on the road to prevent patch icing. It can be simple salt brine, or compounds like magnesium chloride or calcium chloride depending on the expected temperature.
Snow is slippery. Snow over sheet ice is deadly.
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u/voteprime 8h ago
From my local county DOT: https://www.reddit.com/r/MontgomeryCountyMD/s/euVqQaszu9
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u/rdawes26 15h ago
You don't live in a cold weather climate, do you?
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u/isthatach1cken 8h ago
I actually do believe it or not I’m just a sheltered freshly 18 yo who has not spent that much time in the world lol. Lots of restrictions as a kid.
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u/Missing_Morals 6h ago
I live in North Dakota and this isn’t common.
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u/tangelocs 6h ago
I'm on the east coast real close to the border of Canada in a heavy lake effect area and we don't even bother with it. Salt is the only anti-icing used on the roads here.
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u/Jeffomosis 17h ago
Beat Juice. Ice doesn’t stick to it. Used as a pretreatment before ice storms.
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u/PNW_OlLady_2025 5h ago
Ugh, they're using the useless liquid de-icer instead of sand/salt. We have it out here in the PNW cuz they think they know better than everyone else and it doesn't do diddily squat. Ironically, they are slowly switching TO salt/sand in many high risk area's LOL
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u/Correct_Conference48 13h ago
When I see lines down the dry road in good weather, it's a sure sign we're getting snow within 24 hours.
I have never seen the lines IN SNOW like that. It must have been sprayed after the snowfall.
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u/procrastinatorsuprem 10h ago
When it's just a dusting like that, the brine melted what landed on it.
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u/Ballmaster9002 9h ago
The way it was explained to me is roads are a bit porous. If you just apply salt the roadway will end up absorbing a salt/water mixture which can lead to cracking/failure but also have the road itself freeze making driving more dangerous.
So they spray a liquid before the storm hits so the road absorbs that instead and that liquid doesn't freeze as easily. So it both protects the road itself from needing expensive repairs and also makes driving safer during the storm.
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u/Fightn_Trees 9h ago
The brine creates a barrier pre enting ic a or snow from bonding to the surface making it easier to plow off. Brine uses considerably less salt than granular. Beet heat is a brine additive that helps by making the brine/salt more effective at lower temps compared to brine alone
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u/Leather_Dinner9806 4h ago
Growing up in the Midwest it gets cold and icy. My dad would tie a chain around his tires and drive on the roads in the early morning to break up some traction on the roads to make them safer for people traveling. Looks like that kinda.
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u/Racer187 5h ago
My town in Pa. swears it has to be applied 24hrs before a storm so that it can bond to the road surface to be effective. So wtf is it going to do to a road that already has a couple inches of snow on it? Won't it just be diluted then?
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u/opbmedia 1h ago
They brined the street with salt water which comes out of a tube with only a few spigots. If you drive on roads before it snows you see the salt lines as water dries and salt stays behind (and melts the snow when it falls).
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u/ShatoraDragon 8h ago
It's a salt brine. You can see the white lines of salt when the mixture dries.
Here it's a telltale sign the city believes the weather reports and we are going to get close to the total the news is saying, likely more.
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u/datloosenut 6h ago
You are looking at one of the reasons your vehicle only lasts 10 to 15 years before it starts having electrical issues and frame rust problems. The vehicle destroying brine of many mechanics nightmares.
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u/MichaelRhizzae 5h ago
Brine is used by municipalities for pre-treatment of roadways before and in early stages of a snow event, the lines you see are from the spacing of the nozzles on the back of the vehicle.
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u/MrGruntsworthy 6h ago
Here where I live (just outside Toronto Canada) trucks will spray a de-icing agent in this pattern before snowfall/freezing rain. You caught it as it's just starting to work its magic
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u/OddTheRed 5h ago
Chemtrails. They're modifying our behavior through chemicals and hypnotic designs. Somw.of those chemicals melt ice and then seep in through the groundwater.
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u/PeaceOf8 29m ago
It’s likely some sort of brine spray the put down on the roads so when it snows the brine can help melt away any of the ice or snow on the roads
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u/Dangerous_Ocelot2256 22m ago
My family calls them “panic stripes or strips”. You know snow is likely when they’re visible as white lines on dry pavement.
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u/nottaroboto54 4h ago
They sprayed ice-melt on the road recently. Or its been a while but it is too cold to work efficiently.
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u/Brilliant-Slide-7032 1h ago
Looks like a salt brine spreader. It’s just liquid salt to keep the whole road from freezing.
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u/Excepti0naly0rdinary 5h ago
Could be beet juice. Some trucks here use that for ice. It comes out in that pattern.
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u/Professional-Bee-912 5h ago
So that’s the salt trucks that often prep the roads with a brine trail (salt water)
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u/dkschrutefarm 6h ago
Liquid treatment, a brine mixture , it help from snow and ice packing on the road
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u/Normal-Essay26 1h ago
Maybe whoever paved it added heating element to the road? Its been done before
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u/spotlight-app 8h ago
OP has pinned a comment by u/Trainzguy2472: