January 23, 2005

Why not duck sauce?

With a full-scale blizzard blanketing the town of Amherst this morning, it’s worth another slightly edited re-post from Flashes of Panic. This came up before a December snowstorm, but I noticed the same thing earlier this week.

There’s snow forecast for tonight, so the College has been out treating their walkways, and a few town sidewalks (such as the Route 9 sidewalks and those near the Triangle houses) as well. They spray some kind of liquid to prevent ice from accumulating on the walkways, and it has a familiar smell. A few winters ago, I saw where they had applied it where the snow was already down, and it turns out to have a brownish tinge. So far as I can tell, they’re applying soy sauce to the walkways.

That would explain why snow makes me hungry, anyway.

I was happy to see this attention to ice adhesion when I remembered the winter of ‘93-‘94, when a January storm featured about six inches of snow followed by soaking rain and an overnight freeze. The resulting two or three inches of white ice were a foundation for the campus for most of the next few months, despite B&G’s best efforts to clear it from walkways and roads. I was living in Porter that year, and remember only two places with reliably clear pavement: anywhere a walkway crossed over a steam line, and the front walk of Hamilton House, where the custodian made it a point of pride to remove any flake of frozen water.

Parker Morse '96 | January 23, 2005 09:02 AM | Campus