Right now the roads are icy and soon the dirt roads will be muddy – it’s that time of year. The question is whether they should also be a bit more rocky.

“Sand was the standard for years and years. When I was a kid, we used to shovel it out of the back of the truck,” said Gordon Ellis, road agent for Epsom. Ellis has become one of the region’s strongest advocates for spreading less sand to improve traction on winter roadways and spreading small jagged rocks about the size of a pea instead.

“Sand wasn’t a good idea on roads in the first place, but it was the only idea we had. This is much better,” he said.

Stone is not a common road treatment in New Hampshire but it’s not unknown. Pike Industries, for example, said its West Lebanon facility sells various towns “a lot of the product,” which is made from material broken up during quarrying.

For road work, crushed stone is not the same as gravel, although they’re both rocks of roughly the same size. Gravel is naturally shaped, taken from rivers or pits, and its edges are smoother. Because crushed stone is broken down from ledge or larger rocks, it tends to be irregularly shaped, which is an advantage in road treatment because it can anchor in place and help fracture any underlying ice.

Admittedly, spreading lots of jagged little rocks in front of people’s cars doesn’t sound like a great idea.

“People are like: ‘Stone on the roads? What are you, nuts?’ Then they start driving on it and they’re like: ‘This is nice!’” said Chichester road agent James Plunkett, who is another fan. “I hear: ‘It’s going to break the windshield,’ but you’ve got to be moving pretty fast and following the car pretty close for that to be a problem. .. Out West they use it pretty constantly.”

This debate is different than the debate over salt, which chemically causes snow and ice to melt. Sand and stone are used for their mechanical properties to increase traction on snow and ice, although they can indirectly help it melt by absorbing and releasing warmth from sunshine.

Ellis and Plunkett argue that stone has both environmental and operational advantages over sand as a treatment for snowy or icy roads.

It also has some disadvantages. It creates more wear and tear on spreaders than salt. And it costs more. Plunkett said it’s about $7.50 a cubic yard for three-eights-inch stone right now, compared to winter sand at $5 to $6 a cubic yard.

They argue that this cost disappears when you factor in savings in labor and time. Stone doesn’t have to be put down as frequently as sand because it can’t be covered as easily by snow or freezing rain.

“It only takes a 32nd of an inch to cover up a grain of sand. Sometimes you have to put it out four or five times during a storm,” Ellis said.

Importantly, they say, stone is much less likely than sand to be washed into ditches along the side of road. Stone gets embedded in dirt roads, and on paved roads, Ellis said, it mostly gets caught by the shoulders before getting into ditches. “It doesn’t travel as much.”

Road crews spend time, effort and money each summer digging road sand out of drainage ditches and disposing of it.

On dirt roads, he said, using less sand means there’s less mud when thaws hit.

“In the springtime, I don’t have a mud season anymore,” he said. “Come check out the roads. … All the towns that use sand have a mud season. All spring they have to drive trucks and put stone in all those mud spots.”

Then there are environmental considerations.

Many towns in New Hampshire like the rest of the country, are facing an EPA crackdown on stormwater pollution as part of a program known as MS4. Limiting road sand that gets washed into steams is part of that.

“They may need to reduce the amount of sand they’re laying down to comply,” said Steve Landry, who coordinates the non-point source pollution program in the state Department of Environmental Services.

“Many are looking at how they’re going to comply with this permit, not working on getting actual stormwater plans together. That likely includes winter road maintenance operations,” he said. “It’s a very difficult problem, and we sympathize.”

Road sand causes problems in waterways in a couple of ways. The grains can carry other pollutants into the water, but even if they don’t, they can smother plants and aquatic life.

“We’re trying to get away from the sand – it’s killing the streams,” said Plunkett.

Ellis and Plunkett said they feared that EPA rules will make it harder to dispose of sand after it’s been collected from roadside ditches, giving more reason to avoid using it in the first place.

(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, dbrooks@cmonitor.com, or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)

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