Posted 1:57 PM by Gene

A big snow-and-ice storm is coming our way, and several of the property owners have applied an all-too-highly visible coating of calcium chloride pellets on their sidewalks. The nice thing about the pellets is they "tend to roll like small BB's" and when laid down thick as some of the help will do (usually with spreaders, although commonly they get plopped in big clumps) they're as slippery as ice. And as hundreds of feet grind down the pellets (but not their slipperiness) they track a thin dusty white coating onto every nearby carpet. Better still their melting effect doesn't last long, an hour or two at best, which should at least give time for another application or at least some shovelling, but after a while a sidewalk "treated" with these pellets is just as snow-covered as one without. We appreciate the preparedness, but in the end, nothing fights snow as well as a shovel, or a snowblower.