When Jason Fielding, owner of Bentonville Auto Body and Detail, answers calls from customers worried about corrosion from road salt, his advice is simple: “Wash your car.”
Also, he said, be glad this isn’t Chicago.
“Usually what you see, a typical winter in Chicago, they’ll see snow 20 to 25 times a year,” said Fielding, who opened his shop six years ago and spent seven years before that selling auto insurance and inspecting vehicles that had suffered, among other things, corrosion damage. “In NorthwestArkansas, we’ll only see it maybe five or six times a year.”
Fielding and other auto-body experts said they’ve seen corrosive damage to the bodies of motor vehicles that have been driven extensively in Northern states. Those states typical-ly see snowy winters, and abrasive materials including salt, sand and calcium chloride are used more often there than they are during a typical Arkansas winter.
However, Northwest Arkansas has been experiencing more wintry weather intermittently since Dec. 5 than a typical season. As the region braced for an additional wave of freezing precipitation Wednesday afternoon, administrators with several districts of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department were tallying their ongoing expenditures of salt, sand and other abrasives already spread across state roads during one of the toughest winters in recent memory.
Steve Lawrence is district engineer for the department’s District 9, an eight-county area that covers the western half of the state’s Missouri border, from Benton County to Baxter County. Lawrence said his district has spent about $697,000 on abrasives since July 1,, the beginning of the department’s fiscal year.
Lawrence said that translates into more than 10,700 cubic yards of de-icing rock salt, about 715,000 gallons of salt brine, almost 9,000 gallons of magnesium chloride and about 4,600 gallon of beet juice, among other materials.
Other districts also report having used unusually high amounts of abrasives.
Chad Adams, district engineer for the department’s District 4, said his district had spent approximately $303,000 on abrasive materials between Dec. 1 and Dec. 23, spreading about 1,245 cubic yards of salt, 3,200 cubic yards of sand, 1,900 cubic yards of a salt-sand mixture, 605 50-pound bags of calcium chloride pellets and about 17,000 gallons of calcium chloride spray.
“This past week wasn’t anything like that storm we got before Christmas, but in Washington County, we probably used 25 percent again as much as we did in December,” said Adams, whose district covers seven counties along the state’s central-western border from Washington County to Sebastian County.
The good news is, the continued efforts to keep Arkansas roads safe will take less of a toll on newer cars than their predecessors, said Scott Plumlee, automotive and collision program manager for the Northwest Technical Institute in Springdale.
Plumlee said most cars built in the past decade are much less susceptible to corrosion that those built before the turn of the century.
“We’re seeing cars in dealerships now with corrosion warranties that last anywhere from 10 to 50 years,” Plumlee said. “The metal they’re stamping into cars now is coated with zinc.”
Zinc is a primary component in the galvanization process, which prevents materials like salt from gaining a foothold in the steel that makes an up auto body chassis. Plumlee said that after steel is reshaped into chassis frames at factories, it is then typically coated a second time.
“The corrosion protection on earlier cars isn’t nearly as good,” “Plumlee said. “Trailers and anything with exposed steel are much more susceptible.”
According to data from the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, of the approximately 2.5 million private automobiles and pickupsregistered in Arkansas, about 705,000 of them were manufactured in 1999 or earlier. The rest were manufactured in 2000 or later.
Bob Morey, owner of Bob Morey’s Auto Body in Bentonville, said most significant corrosive damage to vehicles occurs from repeated exposure to the abrasive solvents combined with a failure to wash the materials away.
“If you have to drive them roads every single day, and you don’t get it washed off, even if you keep your car in a garage, it’s sitting in your garage with that salt on it,” Morey said.
Morey, who grew up in Missouri and worked as an auto body repair technician for years before moving to Arkansas in 1981, said the use of abrasive salts in the state is so common that “you’d see as much rust repair work as you would wreck repair work.”
Danny Straessle, spokesman for the Highway and Transportation Department, said that while highway departments across the country were trying to incorporate increasingly environmentally friendly products into their de-icing processes, including potato juice, cheese brine and beet juice, Arkansas motorists should try to balance a perspective on Arkansas weather with a common-sense approach to car care.
“We don’t have enough ice events in Arkansas for [corrosion] to be a genuine concern,” Straessle said. “But it’s always a good idea to run your vehicle through a carwash after a winter weather event.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/09/2014