Road dust control

Flood the office of the county road and the supervisor with phone calls! Daily and often. Pester them - the squeaky wheel gets the grease and when my Amish friends and neighbors have an issue with their busy dirt roads - they start calling and calling and calling. In a matter of days, the roads gets gravel or it get sprayed or whatever. PHONE, PHONE, PHONE. And see if that doesn't help!

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Get all your facts about cost, how to spread it, etc - start a campaign with a letter to your local newspaper asking if any other streets have the same issue. Explain how cheaply this can be done.
Get more people on board then all of you go to your local council meeting! Keep calling, writing letters & going to meetings - all of you.
One squeaky person is just considered an irritant - a lot of people with the same problem becomes a real issue in more ways than one - especially if some of those you are fighting are elected officials.

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Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible

I had a problem with some governmnt employees refusing to do their duty in relationship to me. I called the boss and told him I have nothing better to do than call you every 15 minutes till I get the desired action. I also him I would do the same with his his boss in 24 hours. I got immediate response from multiple people the next morning and resolved my problem. Of course I did call the rest of that day every 15 minutes. I did the same type tactic about my road. It got results. My county folks no not to mess with me and treat me fair. Now the road grader guy lives on my road. Yeah!!!!!

And make sure that the Amish neighbor who's son is suffering health-wise from the dust is front and center in all this..... telling the township that a child is at risk, perhaps with an off-the-cuff comment about the newspaper maybe being interested in the story, should help light a fire under them

And if all else fails, start a letter writing campaign to the local newspaper about the sick boy and the township who has failed to do anything about it. If you send emails to the township supervisors, you'll have proof that they are aware of the situation yet have chosen to do nothing about it. And if you can obtain documentation that the supervisors' roads are treated but yours are not, even better

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Imho, if that is the case, your completely SOL. Only way to keep dust down is putting down oil top, or watering it every day. Imagine unless someone had an irrigation system in place (and not in use) that paralleled the road, and could run it for half an hour every day... it'd be cheaper (because having a water tanker come in every day would turn into thousands each month) to actually 'pave it'.

My experiences with road building is this, there is rarely any fix that is both inexpensive and long lasting. I maintain a mile of my own dirt road, with a front end loader on the tractor and a blade on the back (or grading and pulling ditches). Time (which is sometimes precious) and a 80$ tank of diesel gets expensive quickly. My solution is to fix the road, only when it's to the point where we physically can't travel it any more. Remarkably, it keeps most folks from driving down it.... and convinced a neighbor that they'd be better off building their home out where the pavement grows.

Vegetation might slow it down a wee bit, but you'd have to have a pretty good swatch of thick vegetation (cedars, hedges, wild roses, etc.) to make a difference, and that's going to take years.

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We live on a very dusty road also and for several years we paid a contractor to put down dust control. Finally the county took over and puts down magnesium chloride every spring which does mostly last till fall.
It also helps to stabilize the road. Before putting down anything yourself you need to check with your county and most likely they will require you use an approved contractor. It would be a shame for you to spend the money to put it down yourself and then have the county grade it under. When we got the county's approval, they agreed to not grade the road till dust season was over.

Yep, everyone used to use used oil (how's that for a sentence? ) but the EPA nixed that. What is used now (if the EPA hasn't stopped it) is a mixture of water and Calcium chloride. It is a type of salt that draws water out of the air and keeps the dirt moist so it doesn't blow around.

Short of that or getting the road paved, I don't think there are any other options.

This is what our town does a couple of times a year. It works well for a while.

We live on a dirt road and I would not want it paved. I like it the way it is. A dirt road is easy to repair by simply grading it which the town does a couple of times a year and I do spots here and there time to time.

The big problem is drivers who go too fast. When people drive slowly as is appropriate for our road they do not produce clouds of dust. It is the people who insist on going fast that are producing the dust. This is a driver problem. People being in too much of a hurry. Additionally they're destroying their vehicles. These speeding drivers are 100% not people who live here - rather they're using our road as a short cut. It saves a couple of minutes of time, maybe, if they don't get behind me on my tractor or our logging trucks, but they are ruining their suspension in the process. Fools.

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I would not bother wetting it. Dew will react with it. Seed spreader will prolly reach to both sides of the rd going down the middle. I'd just dump a bag in n walk all the way one way till its empty then go back to where u started dump another bag in an walk the opposite way till its gone. See how that wrks n go from there. No need to make a production outta of it yet

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I claim the last post that offended u

I think the problem here lies not with the dust, but the local government. You pay taxes for a reason; it might take voting a few people out to remind them who serves whom.

Being somewhat familiar with local townships, you may or may not have a real gripe. Many rural townships are on a VERY limited budget. Ours has a road commissioner who makes $11,000 a year. No one wants the job because it isn't a living wage and he alone has to try to maintain the roads. The only guys who will run for the job are farmers who use their own tractors to drag the roads occasionally. Their fuel allotment is also small but they get an annual allotment of gravel from state motor fuel taxes. They have 1 dump truck about 10 years old and an old cat road grader that hasn't ran in several years and no money to repair it. However, some townships do mush better. Depends on the tax base.

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Dear Math, it is time you grew up and solved your own problems.

Ever heard of TIMES BEACH MO.??? No well that is because it has been shut down and bought out by the government. Yep it is a scary thing to be working in a flood area and Government men come walking down the street in Moon suits. You have on cut offs and flip flops. The street were dirt and to keep the dust down they put down some recycled oil. It started to kill the horses and other stock. People got sick and the rest is history. Be VERY careful what you use. Just talking from experience.

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Right here is your answer. You need to find out when the next meeting is and invite (and coerce) ALL of your neighbors on that road to go. You might also want to invite the local news too. (They love stories like this.)

Then, each and everyone of you need to start standing up and telling the township supervisors the problem during community comments. If anyone is good with a camera and can set up a power point, you could also provide a show of "This is our road that is highly traveled with lots of dust." These are the roads the township supervisors live on with very little traffic and no dust. Now how can this be?" DEMAND that everyone be heard at the meeting to drag it on. Inform the Supervisors that the following day, the people on your road are going to start a phone calling campaign to ask when the dust problem is going to be taken care of, and will be calling several times per day and asking the same question.

Between a long drawn out meeting, embarassment that their roads are taken care of and yours are not, threats of phone calls, and the news being there and being the "big story" the next day, I'm guessing those supervisors will be over to your road the following day to get the problem taken care of.

You also should inquire when one of their terms is up and have somebody from YOUR road run for election. Who knows, if a term is up this year and will be voted on in the fall, start now to find a candidate and to run a write in campaign for the candidate.

If you fix the road yourself, you are defeating the whole purpose and nothing will EVER get done with your road. Become the "squeaky wheel" and they will get tired of the interaction and fix the road to shut you up.

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Michael W. Smith in North-West Pennsylvania

"Everything happens for a reason."

There are other options.
We live on a river and our section of county road also fronts a pond and creek. I wouldn't want oil running into that. What we used when we put down dust control (through a contractor) ourselves was a ligno-sulfonatemade made from tree sap. It worked very well and does not have any adverse affect on water. When the county took over, they switched to magnesium chloride.

Our county sprays calcium chloride twice a year. We live on a small dirt road, but our neighbors think it's a drag strip. Speed limit is 20, people typically go about 60. Calcium chloride works great for the few months after it's applied.

If it were up to me, the best solution would be to get rid of neighbors

Also probably doesn't help if you have a lot of Amish in the area that don't have to pay taxes to the county.

Thanks for all the reply's. To touch on a few comments.

Amish DO pay property tax so they are entitled to a better dust free road also.

They do not have phones though so calling all the time is not going to be effective for them plus most Amish men are working either in a job during the day and doing all their other work in the afternoons. The woman are not going to call.

Also on calling. There is a secretary there on Monday afternoon and Thursday mornings. That is it. Any other time of the day calls go to voice mail so calling and harassing the township will go to voice mail most of the time. The secretary will relay messages.
There is no local news here. I would need to call a news station from 40 miles away and I highly doubt this would be a news story but who knows?

There is an election coming up. The one person that is running this time besides the elected officials that are on now is a ex meth user and not the best character. Don't think he will do any better.
Amish don't vote and being that there are more Amish [all related] on this road then English are voting power is not the best anyway.

As far as speeding being the issue in causing the dust. No in most cases. Some people do speed but because of the huge tractors that is the issue more so. They are running in low gear. Have had problems with them in the past when running silage and Speeding.

Stopped a couple of them last year and told them flat out if they did not slow down I would drive our tractor up and down the road all day long in low gear and they would not be able to pass. They slowed down.

Roofing nails. They'll slow down..... And by that, I mean hold an old roofing nail box, and toss a handful of gravel in front of a speeding car. Perception.....

Our county sprays an oil solution on the road for a $25 fee.Have you talked to the county engineer?You would want to request that they not grade the road where you spray yourself.

In the county I used to live in the only way one could get their road fixed was to get elected road commissioner.

The state road tax money give to the counties could only be used on certain roads... there wasn't much tax money left.... so the country rd the commissioner lived on was the one that got fixed.

The job rotated a lot