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Opening Arguments

Beet it

Beets. Is there anything they can't do? Oh, wait. That's chocolate. Or bacon. But anyway:

Road crews in a southern Indiana county say they're saving the county tens of thousands of dollars using a mixture of beet juice and salt brine to keep local roads free of snow and ice.

Knox County road foreman Joe Pea tells the Vincennes Sun-Commercial that the unusual mixture is much cheaper and faster-acting than traditional rock salt as a road pretreatment. He says it cost about $2,900 to use the beet juice-brine during a snowfall last week.

That's far less than the $20,000 cost of using traditional rock salt, and Pea says he and his co-workers may have saved the county $100,000 by building their own equipment for spreading the beet juice-brine mixture.

Pea says calls are coming in from other cities eager to try the same system.

Apparently, cities and states have been experimenting with the beet-brine mixture for a couple of years now, so Indiana is behind the curve again. When the great ethanol craze began, many of us railed against the stupidy of raiding the food chain for other uses. I think we can make an exc

Comments

Bob G.
Tue, 01/18/2011 - 11:22am

Leo:
I kinda feel the same about vodka...and they also use THAT for snow removal on roads (who'da thunk?)
Course, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans when your street is that low on the plow list (or your property gets torn up by the plows).
Maybe they should mix vodka AND the beets...lol.

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