It ’s soft to disregard some things you see on elevator car trip , like theblack tubesthat sometimes extend across theroad , or thebrightly colored ballson business leader lines . The giant memory domes that drink down on the side of highway are harder to miss . Many hoi polloi pass the strange wayside architecture every 24-hour interval without knowing its determination . According toCanada Salt Group Ltd. , the structures are used to stack away monumental measure of route salt for snowstorms .
States and municipalities postulate a lot of salt to keep roads safe and meth - free during the wintertime . route salt does n’t go risky as long as it ’s kept dry , so it ’s price - effective to store the material in majority on the side of the highway . Domes with 150 - metrical foot - diameter , 12 - understructure - tall concrete walls can lay in up to 19,000 loads of common salt . Whenever a snowy or glacial road needs to be cleared , workers have easy accession to more salt than they hopefully demand .
Storing ice in bulk explains the sizing of these construction , but not their unusual physical body . The reason route salinity is hive away in attic instead of more conventional four - walled buildings is to maximise the clear space inside . In architecture , the termclear spandescribes the unobstructed area between two supports . A noodle design allows for alarge , tallindoor place without reinforcement balance beam , so the trucks that ship the saltiness can move freely inside it . The materials these domes are made of also service a purpose . Because salt is corrosive , the computer storage sites comprise of concrete , wooden beam , and ceiling shingles rather of metal .
No matter how sure-enough it gets , salt never loses its power to dissolve trash . This is becausesalt lowersthe freeze point of piss , which is normally 32 ° F , to between 20 ° farad and 2 ° F . So until roads withbuilt - in saltbecome a matter , storage domes will likely remain a fixture of our roadways .
