We see it every year, as winter weather approaches the City of Reno starts winterizing the roadways to help keep drivers safe.

The preventative work they do include laying down brine with 21 snowplow trucks at the ready. 

Today only five of them are laying the groundwork before the storm.

Tim Hendricks is the Street Division Manager, Maintenance and Operations, for the City of Reno and he says “If we get any snow it’s going to make the roads really slick so we’re applying the brine to keep the snow from bonding to the asphalt.”

The snowplow trucks focus on hills, curves and intersections because they tend to be the places people lose the most traction when driving.

Brining before the inclimate weather hit is very important because it prevents the snow from packing down into ice.

Hendricks explains “This gives it a barrier and as the moisture comes down on the white lines on the road, the brine, it reactivates the salt in it and keeps it from bonding to the pavement.” 

After the snow gets slushy from the brine the snow plow trucks are able to scape the excess brine off the roads.

Hendricks mentions “We get stocked up with our sand and our salt mixture, we mix it and store it so right now we’re sitting at about 600 tons of salt sand mixture.”

The City of Reno says they are sparing with how they spread the brine on the roadways because they want to be environmentally safe when it come to keeping the brine out of the river.

“So we really mind where we are putting it at we don’t try and do really long stretches we really try to concentrate on hills on the curves and intersections where people are going to need traction that’s where we try to apply the brine.”

The trucks typically start in the higher elevations like Stead, Somerset, along the Eastern slope of the Sierra and Caughlin Ranch. They also have a list of specific streets they brine that get icier than other during the winter more than others such as Skyline Boulevard.

Hendricks says “We always start up there the hilliest sections with the brine first and then work our way down.”

He also mentions once the brine gets hit with moisture that's when it's activated.