A geodesic line is the shortest route between two points across a surface. A geodesic dome is a spherical form constructed from a framework of triangles arranged to create structural strength via tension.
For Ted Deery, owner of Crete-based Bulk Storage Inc., the geodesic dome has become the shortest route from struggling entrepreneur/idealist to financially secure public works ally/salt storage expert/environmental advocate. Demonstrating a quick wit, he points out that salt, once used as money, is the currency that will finance college educations for the Deery children, Alison, 9, and Zachary, 7.
“Ten years ago this concept didn’t exist. Seven years ago I started this business and thought it would be a part-time thing,” said the Crete resident.
The concept is the use of geodesic domes for road salt storage. If he sounds a little breathless, it might be because Bulk Storage Inc. went from zero to $2-plus million in annual sales within its first five years.
The company got its beginnings locally, with one storage dome in Batavia. Today, with 12 full-time employees, it builds some 40 salt storage domes per year nationally, mainly in the northern snow belt states that stretch from New Jersey to Washington.
Don Schultz, project designer for the Kansas State Architectural Services Department, for whom Deery has built nearly 20 salt storage buildings, said there are two reasons for Bulk Storage’s achievement. First, within the last 10 years or so the federal Environmental Protection Agency has made everyone aware of the negative effects of unprotected stored salt leeching into the water table.
Second, he said, “(The buildings) are great. They work. We’ve been very pleased with them.”
So pleased is Schultz that he foresees the potential, given their continued low-bid success, for 12 more Bulk Storage domes per year during the next four to five years in Kansas. He points out that although Kansas snowfalls don’t compare to those of Illinois, “our ice and freezing rainstorms can be devastating, and we have to line up for road salt like everyone else,” even though Kansas is home to several salt mines.
Deery credits one more thing for Bulk Storage’s success: “The excellent job public works employees are doing by keeping roads and highways clear of ice and safe for driving. They call it `black pavement’ and they race to achieve it as fast as possible after a storm.”
Bill Taylor, director of public works for the village of Romeoville, says he is pleased with the village’s new Bulk Storage salt dome, just completed last fall. He says his department’s streets division prides itself on getting that community’s 75 miles of streets and roads clear in a very timely manner. By protecting salt from crusting over and freezing when exposed to the elements, the storage dome eases their task, he says.
The 45-year-old Deery recalled there was a time, as recently as when he got his drivers’ license at 16, “when it snowed or sleeted and we didn’t go out. We just didn’t drive anywhere.”
Today, thanks in large part to the ever-improving efforts of the folks in public works, Deery said people don’t expect to be held up by inclement weather for very long.
“The better they do their job, the more people expect roadways to be dry more quickly,” Deery said.
Additionally, Americans have adopted a lifestyle that resists shutdown for any reason, he explained. It is no longer acceptable, whether in social or business situations, to cancel or postpone appointments. As a result, Deery, who got involved with geodesic domes as a young man right out of college, feels public service is inherent in Bulk Storage’s mission.
It’s important for people to be able to travel safely on dry roads, he believes. It’s important for public works departments to have enough salt on hand to achieve those dry roads. It’s important that their salt supplies remain predictable. It’s important that stored salt doesn’t contaminate the substrata. All are goals that one-time Deery mentor and college professor the late R. Buckminster Fuller would approve of–especially the part about achieving these goals by means of geodesic domes.
Fuller, an architect and engineer who is credited with inventing the geodesic dome, was a professor at Southern Illinois University when Deery was a student there. Even though Deery was a psychology major, it was in Fuller’s design classes that he caught the professor’s zeal for the geodesic dome.
“I didn’t understand how it worked. But it did work. I was captivated,” he recalled.
Shortly out of college Deery followed a course set by his minor in design. He and college friend Bob Casey of St. Charles started working for a company called Domes America. Based in Villa Park, the company builds geodesic residential, commercial and industrial domes all over the world, according to Casey, company president. Domes America builds the pre-fab salt storage units that Bulk Storage sells and constructs on site. The components of the structures are manufactured in Coloma, Wis., just north of Madison.
Casey also was a student of Fuller but noted that he didn’t become interested in the geodesic domes until he saw for himself the “incredible strength of the structure” on a trip out East. He also explained that, although domes were commonly used for farm storage, it wasn’t until the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia called on Domes America to build one for storing the facility’s road salt in 1987 that he and Deery considered that possibility.
From that humble beginning Deery formed a vision of the vast American road system, punctuated every several miles with earth-shaped, earth-friendly salt storage domes. But before that could be accomplished, Deery had to learn something of salt, its corrosive properties and its storage requirements.
According to Andy Briscoe, director of public policy for the Alexandria, Va.-based Salt Institute, there are 14,000 uses for salt in areas from agriculture to cosmetics. De-icing streets and roads is but one use, albeit a popular one. Some 13 million tons are used annually to de-ice North American snow belt roads, according to the 81-year-old Salt Institute, a non-profit international trade association of salt producers.
The institute encourages under-roof storage in order to protect salt from the environment. Precipitation can cause salt to cake, eventually returning to its original rock state, and it can cause salt to dissolve. It also promotes under-roof storage of salt on an impermeable pad, Briscoe said, to protect the environment from contamination.
With increased concern about the environment, the emphasis on under-roof storage for salt also has expanded, according to Briscoe. Salt storage facilities are big-ticket items, costing between $50,000 and $500,000 each. Bulk Storage is one of about a dozen salt storage building companies in the United States that construct a variety of structure types, from pole barns to domes. Bulk Storage is the only one Briscoe knows of that builds geodesic domes.
Bulk Storage’s domes can be from 25 to 100 feet in diameter, Deery says, with foot-thick concrete walls as high as 10 feet. A 100-foot-diameter dome with walls 10 feet high has a 6,413-ton capacity. Romeoville’s recently constructed dome is 72 feet in diameter with 6-foot-high walls. It has a 2,187-ton storage capacity with a center height of about 40 feet. It cost the community about $80,000, Deery said.
Small price to pay, according to Briscoe, when one is looking at salt storage structures that will last some 30 to 40 years.
On a recent tour of Romeoville’s salt storage dome, Deery wore an ear-to-ear grin. It was the day after the kind of winter storm of freezing rain, sleet and snow that closes airports and can bring road travel to a screeching halt. He admitted feeling almost giddy as he drove around the southern suburbs the day before, salt pelting the wheel wells of his black Ford pickup.
“I thought, I can’t wait to get back to the office where telephone calls will be coming in from public works directors asking if I can build them a salt storage dome. And I will smile and I will say, `absolutely,’ ” Deery said.
Standing there in Romeoville’s dome, he was dwarfed by the huge pile of salt remaining after the previous day’s storm. Even so, Deery exclaimed, “Day before yesterday this whole dome was full! Now look. One storm and they’ve used up half their supply.”
That, said Deery, is the best part of his business. When salt is under-roof, public works directors know how much salt they have.
“If it’s exposed to the weather they don’t know how much has dissolved or how much has turned to stone and is, therefore, unusable. Imagine publishing a newspaper without knowing how much newsprint you have available,” he said. He is also proud of his expertise on the special salt-storage features of Bulk Storage’s domes.
“This asphalt pad is impervious to salt,” he said, kicking the floor with the toe of his boot. “We researched the glues and hardware so they wouldn’t corrode from salt dust. The lumber from which the dome is built is of a specific moisture content. It has no knots or splits,” said Deery as he points upward.
From the inside the ceiling looks like a complicated spatial puzzle of wooden triangles. Mitred 2 by 6s fit together at the corners like neatly folded linens. Deery explained that the ceiling structure is actually assembled from 11 sections, six pentagons and five hexagons, and must fit tightly because the sphere is the “most unforgiving structure.”
The doorway is wide, allowing easy truck and loader access. It faces south-southwest, away from the prevailing wind.
Indeed, despite the high velocity winds Kansas is famous for, Schultz said they have had no problems with Deery’s Bulk Storage domes.
“The specially mixed poured concrete walls are sealed and reinforced with coated (steel bars),” Deery said. “This building has no footings.” He pauses to let that thought sink in. These buildings, which have no doors on them because salt dust corrodes metal door hinges and closures, merely rest upon the asphalt pad.
Lindsey Lawson, construction supervisor in the Division of Real Property for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, recalled that a tornado blew through a public works yards in Nicholasville during the summer of ’95. Despite gusts strong enough to wipe out their main maintenance building, “and everything else that got in its way,” the tornado did minimal damage to their Bulk Storage dome. It lost about a third of its shingles, which Bulk Storage repaired, Lawson said.
Deery gets a kick out of explaining this part of the construction. Footings that pierce the earth’s surface–no matter how shallow–provide an expressway from a salt building-pad directly to the substrata, he says. Footings on these storage buildings are not environmentally sound, according to Bulk Storage, and not necessary due to the structural integrity of a geodesic dome, they say.
Deery is nonplussed when faced with a question about the environmental soundness of salt runoff from the street applications. Briscoe is not.
“Salt runoff from street and road application is quickly disseminated. Studies have shown that the biggest threat as a result of leeching contamination is from careless salt storage,” Briscoe said.
That’s a threat Deery is ready to hold in check. Even though salt is his bread and butter he is conscientious about it. But . . .
“Whenever somebody complains about the damage salt does to their automobile’s body, I tell them to think about that the next time they’re sliding sideways through an intersection that hasn’t been salted.”
Ted Deery also knows that the shortest route to make a point is often a punch line.
