How DC makes enough brine to keep city roads safe for winter weather

Cornelious Phillips watched on Thursday afternoon as brine made its way onto trucks in Northeast D.C., as part of a process he’s played a role in for over a decade.

Phillips runs the brine program through D.C.’s Department of Transportation, work that unfolds at the Street and Bridge Maintenance Facility in Northeast. Three to four days before winter weather arrives, he ensures the mixture is made correctly and loaded onto trucks to be spread throughout the city.

“It kind of gives us an opportunity to get ahead of the storm,” Phillips said. “It prevents the snow from bonding with the roadway, so it helps us get it up a lot easier.”

The brine is made as long as a storm event doesn’t start out as rain, which would wash it away.

A hopper takes the salt, and there’s a machine that calculates salt percentages of the mixture, Phillips said. Once it reaches 23% salt, the mixture is moved to storage tanks.

The process creates 5,000 gallons of brine in an hour. About 45,000 gallons are needed to have enough to spread on roads across the entire city.

Hoses load the brine onto trucks, which hold about 2,000 gallons each. Each truck has assigned routes, and there are about 19 in total, but “you can only load three at a time, so everything has to kind of be in sync.”

“They’re going out, hitting the streets one lane at a time,” Phillips said. “You might have four-lane streets, you have to make four passes. Once they run out, they come back, get reloaded, they go back out, hit the next street or finish that street off, until they finish their route.”

D.C. has two other places where brine can be stored, but Phillips said the Northeast facility is the only place it gets made and loaded at the same time.

During the worst winter he remembers, the city’s used about 260,000 gallons of brine.

“It’s a simple process,” Phillips said. “I’ve been doing this, 17 to 18 years, so I got it pretty down pat.