The Math of a new venue?

[mstrdinan]

already a 1 1/2 mile in limestone maine.......long tow for a lot of people

[Milwaukee Midget]

Whoa -- thanks, Tom.  That's some in depth research (even if it's wrong ).  Your conclusion, though - that if one of us wins a big payoff in the lottery he'd be able to lease the land and provide it for racing.  I wonder what BLM would say about that -- since he (we?) would be paying a fee to BLM and NOT taking out any material/minerals.  Maybe they'd give him/us a better lease rate because we wouldn't degrade the inventory of available potash.  Do you think so?  Would you like to write the cover letter to the BLM and I'll sign it with a few of the other racers?  Thanks.

 

There is still support among Western Representatives and Senators to pass a "use it or lose it" bill, which would require a lease holder to extract or lose the right to do so on leased publically owned property.  It's not law yet, but given the stink Tim DeChristopher made when he went in and outbid all the major and small petroleum extraction firms in an oil and gas lease auction, pretty firm scrutiny as to who is bidding on leases is now the norm . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Jn46pVutc

The other downside is that if potash extraction were halted in its tracks, any cooperation from the owners of the plant would go away, and we'd be sitting with mountains of salt on the wrong side of the road, and no cost effective way of moving it back to where it belongs.

I might be wrong, but I don't think it was a coincidence that the largest amount of salt returned to the flats roughly coincided with a year of record high potash prices.

[Grant Borman]

On the other page someone mentioned an evaporation pond. Im sure there are some places in the US where this might be somewhat feasible. Could even lease the land maybe.  Someplace near the Salton Sea might be a good location. Can pump the super saturated salt water into a evap pond and have the state pump sea water in to make the water less toxic. Could set up a desalination plant there to provide irrigation water for the local farm land(well it could be farm land if there was enough water) and a nice 12x1 mile evap pond that can double as a LSR venue a few times a year. Best part is its paid for by the state/federal government. Oh and the elevation is below sea level too.

What about getting the Sierra Club to attack the potash operation? They had Pikes Peak paved via law suit. Im sure there is something they can find wrong with the potash operation.

[Elmo Rodge]

Grant said "What about getting the Sierra Club to attack the potash operation? They had Pikes Peak paved via law suit. Im sure there is something they can find wrong with the potash operation."

Without finding something wrong with nasty old racing cars?  Wayno

[bbarn]

Why build the evaporation pond off of the salt flats? Why not just build a set of retaining walls on the salt flats and use a pump/levee system to maintain the current course?

Let's say for argument sake, you built a levee 3 ft high that gave a 15 mile course 1 mile wide right on the salt. Wouldn't it be cheaper than finding another location somewhere else and pumping brine into it?

Think about this too, if we had levees around the track, not only could we decide the depth of salt we wanted, we could also control the water on the track. As a matter of fact, once the salt of the track was raised above the surrounding salt say more than 3 inches you could remove the levees. Then it would take 3+ inches of water to halt racing. Maybe three feet of levee is too much, maybe a six inch levee would do the trick?

I would love to have 15 miles of flat, paved surface that wasn't a 36 hour drive from my house, but I don't see that happening, it is just too expensive. So the next best thing would be to protect and improve what we have with the resources readily available. Besides, we could then continue the Bonneville tradition until there is literally no salt left.

[Tman]

On the other page someone mentioned an evaporation pond. Im sure there are some places in the US where this might be somewhat feasible. Could even lease the land maybe.  Someplace near the Salton Sea might be a good location. Can pump the super saturated salt water into a evap pond and have the state pump sea water in to make the water less toxic. Could set up a desalination plant there to provide irrigation water for the local farm land(well it could be farm land if there was enough water) and a nice 12x1 mile evap pond that can double as a LSR venue a few times a year. Best part is its paid for by the state/federal government. Oh and the elevation is below sea level too.

What about getting the Sierra Club to attack the potash operation? They had Pikes Peak paved via law suit. Im sure there is something they can find wrong with the potash operation.

It is sad to see the Salton sea today compared to the heyday of the 50s with resorts and powerboat racing!

[desotoman]

Whoa -- thanks, Tom.  That's some in depth research (even if it's wrong ).  Your conclusion, though - that if one of us wins a big payoff in the lottery he'd be able to lease the land and provide it for racing.  I wonder what BLM would say about that -- since he (we?) would be paying a fee to BLM and NOT taking out any material/minerals.  Maybe they'd give him/us a better lease rate because we wouldn't degrade the inventory of available potash.  Do you think so?  Would you like to write the cover letter to the BLM and I'll sign it with a few of the other racers?  Thanks.

 

There is still support among Western Representatives and Senators to pass a "use it or lose it" bill, which would require a lease holder to extract or lose the right to do so on leased publically owned property.  It's not law yet, but given the stink Tim DeChristopher made when he went in and outbid all the major and small petroleum extraction firms in an oil and gas lease auction, pretty firm scrutiny as to who is bidding on leases is now the norm . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Jn46pVutc

The other downside is that if potash extraction were halted in its tracks, any cooperation from the owners of the plant would go away, and we'd be sitting with mountains of salt on the wrong side of the road, and no cost effective way of moving it back to where it belongs.

I might be wrong, but I don't think it was a coincidence that the largest amount of salt returned to the flats roughly coincided with a year of record high potash prices.

Chris,

Thanks for that youtube link. He explains how the bidding on leased land worked when he was present.

Tom G.

[Richard 2]

Why not just run on the South side of I-80??? That is where the salt went.......

God I wish it was that easy!

The high speed tire situation really has us committed to running on salt, anything else won't keep them cool on a seven or eight mile pass. 300 ish is doable on dirt but much beyond that will require more distance & a different tire.
  Sid.

If you could find 5 to 10 miles of flat ground why not just run on the dirt. No concrete needed.
Richard 2

[Crackerman]

Why build the evaporation pond off of the salt flats? Why not just build a set of retaining walls on the salt flats and use a pump/levee system to maintain the current course?

Let's say for argument sake, you built a levee 3 ft high that gave a 15 mile course 1 mile wide right on the salt. Wouldn't it be cheaper than finding another location somewhere else and pumping brine into it?

Think about this too, if we had levees around the track, not only could we decide the depth of salt we wanted, we could also control the water on the track. As a matter of fact, once the salt of the track was raised above the surrounding salt say more than 3 inches you could remove the levees. Then it would take 3+ inches of water to halt racing. Maybe three feet of levee is too much, maybe a six inch levee would do the trick?

I would love to have 15 miles of flat, paved surface that wasn't a 36 hour drive from my house, but I don't see that happening, it is just too expensive. So the next best thing would be to protect and improve what we have with the resources readily available. Besides, we could then continue the Bonneville tradition until there is literally no salt left.

To build that levee, all it would take is a motor grader and an afternoon. Dig the blade through the salt to pick up some clay that wont be washed away by new water and it will pitch a berm plenty high as far as you can drive it.

[Milwaukee Midget]

There is more to erosion than just water, and water wants to seek its own level.

Wind would be constantly chipping away at such a berm, and that wind would be carrying a very effective abrasive.

On top of that, wind would also be washing the water against the berm, further eroding it.

I'm not sure what the structure of the existing dikes are, but they are pretty substantial, and built on a more solid substrate than what is closer to where we race.

I suspect building such a berm would require a bit more work than what somebody could do with just a grader.

And if we were to go in and start modifying the landscape to suit our needs, it could then be argued that we're as unconcerned about the natural surroundings as the potash producer.

Additionally, the BLM can't officially "confirm" salt loss right now.  The studies that would need to take place in order to change the landscape that significantly would take years, there is a fair likelihood that the best conclusion would be inconclusive, and then there's the cost of actually doing the work.

Not ruling out the idea - if the dikes could be built in such a way that they preserved a safer, longer race venue, I'd be all for it.  I'm just questioning the simplicity of the solution, and wondering about the process that would need to go into place in order to make it a possibility.

[Grant Borman]

In regards to the Sierra Club comment i made. Could they not come up with a way regulating the amount of salt on the flats? Measure the average thickness everywhere and feed that into an equation that says how much salt they can use each year? Just have to make sure the target thickness is enough for a healthy track.

[Tman]

Dikes hold water in. What happens when it rains overnight during or right before  a meet? As it sits, lots of times the wind pushes the water away from the courses and we race. If you contain it you just made a holding pond. Airboat races! The Propish one would love it.

[bbarn]

Dikes hold water in. What happens when it rains overnight during or right before  a meet? As it sits, lots of times the wind pushes the water away from the courses and we race. If you contain it you just made a holding pond. Airboat races! The Propish one would love it.

TMan, the thought would be that you dyke it up and pump brine into it and let the water evaporate. This would raise an area of salt that would be the racing surface. I don't think it would need to be 3ft high, just high enough to make a salt plateau. If it rained, the water could roll off the plateau or if the wind blew water around, it would have to be deeper than the height of the plateau before it interfered with the racing surface.

[ChrisLenahan]

There is a 15,000 ft runway in Southern California that might work better then the Spaceport in New Mexico -Southern California Logistics Airport formerly known as George AFB.  I'm guessing it being used for cargo flights.  There is a 27,000 ft runway not that far away but it is government owned and they refuse to admit that it even exists.

[Seldom Seen Slim]

Motor  grader idea:  As I remember, a few years ago there was a time when the salt was rougher than a cob -- so bad that racing wasn't going to e possible - probably.  The story goes that USFRA retained the service of a motor grader to power-grade the surface to make it smooth.  And it didn't work.  The salt was very hard - and even with the positive down pressure afforded by the weight of the machine - it couldn't give reliable results over long distances.

Then you've got to add the difficulty of grading the salt where it's inches thick here, feet thick there, and millimeters thick in other places.  Scrape through the salt and into the mud -- and that's all for that particular patch for a few years or decades.

Bbarn, to make your dike/berm work you'd have to keep the rain from falling inside the dike.  That'll take a mighty big umbrella.