By: Jason Fenske
Geisinger Medical Center used salt to treat icy winter roadways, sidewalks and parking lots at the facility’s 10 Pennsylvania campuses. With a responsibility of ensuring the safety of 6,000 employees and thousands of patients and visitors, the medical center headquartered in Danville was running into cost issues from pre-treating the salt onsite.
“Most of the time we just used salt,” said Denny Strouse, facilities operations manager at Geisinger Medical Center. “Then one year we decided to spray the salt with a deicing liquid so that it would work better when it hit the pavement, but that proved to be labor intensive and costly.”
With a tip from a salt truck driver, Strouse was introduced to a pre-wetted salt product that eliminated the hassle of spraying and treating the salt in-house. Once he learned the product was available from his current salt supplier, he didn’t hesitate to find out more information.
“I was on the phone with our supplier in two days asking about the pre-wetted salt,” he said.
Called ClearLane enhanced deicer, the pre-wetted salt product is produced by Cargill Deicing Technology. It’s a green-tinted granular deicer that has been designated as a Design for the Environment product by the U.S. EPA. The product is made up of traditional sodium chloride that contains deicing additives and is pre-treated with liquid magnesium chloride.
Pre-wetting became essential for Strouse and his maintenance team because of the faster melting time and reduced labor. The team takes care of 10 miles of roadways, nine miles of sidewalk, and parking lots with 9,000 parking stalls, and was able to spend more time treating the facility rather than pre-treating the salt.
Above all else, ensuring the safety of staff, patients and visitors is essential to the Geisinger Medical Center’s winter-maintenance procedures.
“It’s a busy place,” Strouse said. “We send more than 10,000 people a day through here. We need to make sure they’re safe in the winter.”
