Salt of the Earth?

 Da Sun, Maryland transportation crews are using less salt, more brine on icy roads to protect waterways

Crews treating state highways and county roads are expected to scatter less rock salt and spray more brine solution to melt ice on roads before and during Friday’s snowfall, a measure aimed at reducing the amount of sodium chloride that runs off highways and contaminates soil and groundwater.

“Our federal and state commitments to clean water ensure that we track different sources of pollution and types of pollution, and increasingly the evidence is clear that road salt and other de-icing chemicals can threaten the quality of our streams, rivers and lakes, and drinking water supplies above-ground and underground,” said Ben Grumbles, the Maryland secretary of the environment.

The Maryland Department of the Environment has been working with the State Highway Administration to find alternative methods to clear roads for winter travel that are not as reliant on rock salt. The highway administration said in a statement the agency has cut its overall salt usage in half over a five-year period.

The agency, part of the Maryland Department of Transportation, has used brine in addition to rock salt for more than 10 years, said Sherry Christian, a highway administration spokeswoman.

As extreme weather events become more common, transportation crews are pivoting to less harmful ways to pre-treat roadways, such as using brine, a liquid solution with a lower salt concentration — about 22% salt and 78% water. Crews spray brine before a storm to prevent snow.  Without the pre-treatment, the highway administration said it would have to use significantly more rock salt to melt ice from road surfaces after a snowstorm. If a snowstorm starts as rain, however, the department does not apply the pre-treatment because it will wash away, Christian said.

First, there's just no evidence what so ever that weather events are becoming "more extreme", what ever that means. It's just newspeak for "Global warming, bad"

In our last snow event, a few days ago, the roads were sprayed with brine at least three days in advance, so early that the roads had to be resprayed before snow came. It wasn't much of an event, and I kind of think we would have been OK without treatment, except for the fact that Maryland drivers are idiots, in general. Up near the Great Lakes, they'd sneer at 3-4 inches. 

The environment department has been working with state and local agencies for several years to apply alternative strategies for applying salt to roads, Grumbles said. The Federal Highway Administration recommends transportation crews use 300 to 500 pounds of rock salt per lane mile during winter events, according to the SHA. Eight years ago, the department was averaging 1,000 pounds of salt per lane mile to melt snow and ice.

The highway administration is now applying half that rate this winter, around 500 pounds of salt per lane mile, a change it considers to be its most dramatic way of reducing salt use, Christian said.

Snowplows also are becoming more efficient at clearing wider areas to prevent the need to repeatedly salt throughout a storm, officials said. The state transportation department has two new “tow plows” that attach to the back of snow plows and clear additional travel lanes by swinging side to side like a broom while dispensing salt. The tow plows are steerable and don’t require fuel. They’re estimated to cost $86,000 each and are used on I-70 in Howard County and I-68 in Garrett County.

I haven't been one of those in action yet, but that sounds kind of scary, actually.

When rock salt is used it’s now sprayed with brine right before it’s scattered so it’s “pre-wet” and sticks to the road rather than bounce off the pavement and possibly ricochet into soil or local waterways. Rocks are sprayed at the spinner in the rear of a dump truck and become a consistency that resembles oatmeal.

Even a relatively low amount of salt can degrade waterways and kill freshwater fish, Grumbles said.

“If it’s a trout stream, trout are not meant to live in saltwater. It’s altering the chemistry of the waterbody,” Grumbles said. “Sometimes slight alterations have significant and fatal impacts.” and ice from sticking to the road.

That's just wrong. Most trout species, in fact, run to the sea to grow if given half a chance, this includes Rainbow Trout, which return from the sea as steelhead, and even the lowly Brook Trout, Maryland's only native species, can run  to the sea, and return as relative giants to spawn.  There are fish that don't tolerate salt well, but trout aren't them. And in Maryland, many of our freshwater fish tolerate mildly brackish water naturally in the 

Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Sunday: SUNshine Girl up at The Other McCain.

There May Be Gold in Them Thar Hills, But . . .

There's platinum on them thar roads:

Now That Spring is at the Door

EPA Bay Program goes on its annual war against road salt: Road salt putting human, aquatic lives on a collision course

Nationwide, 10 times as much salt goes on the road as is used to season all processed foods. But as with food, too much salt in freshwater is harmful. It’s a growing problem that threatens efforts to protect stream health in the Chesapeake watershed, and even in the Bay itself.

“Salt is an unfolding train wreck for streams across the mid-Atlantic and I think across the United States,” said Robert Hilderbrand, a stream scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Appalachian Laboratory, at a conference last winter.

Yet he noted the paradox that confronts elected officials and highway crews each winter: He said he was only able to attend the conference because the roads had been salted the day before because of an ice storm.
. . .
“The bottom line is that freshwater animals don’t tend to like saltwater — particularly the most sensitive of animals, like some amphibians and mussels,” said Scott Stranko, who oversees stream monitoring programs at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Salt tolerances vary quite a lot in freshwater animals. Many fish are quite tolerant of salt, and benefit from an addition of salt to their water. Most trout, for example, can run into sea water, and live there for a majority of their life, as can most bass and many catfish.

I think the problem of road salt is exaggerated by the EPA, but I urge them to get salt use banned in Washington D.C. for a few year before they try to enlarge the ban nationwide.

Also some classic fear mongering at By the Numbers: 2.5 million

According to the Chesapeake Stormwater Network, between 10 and 20 million tons of road salt—the most common form of which is sodium chloride—are applied to the nation’s highways each year. About a third of this is applied to states in the mid-Atlantic, and stormwater professionals estimate that 2.5 million tons of road salt are applied annually across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. While a Chesapeake Bay Commission review of regional road salt policies found that the indiscriminate application of road salt does not typically occur in Maryland, Virginia or Pennsylvania, evidence shows that chloride concentrations in Maryland’s freshwater streams have increased over the last 40 years because of salt accumulation.

What you have to go elsewhere at the Bay Program to find:

Approximately 51 billion gallons of water flow into the Bay each day from its freshwater tributaries.

A Low Salt Diet for the Bay?

Professional Worriers Worry About Salt in Chesapeake Bay

Crews have been treating roads with more than the usual amount of salt during this extra snowy winter. Many people are concerned over the effect it is having on their cars but researchers are more concerned by the impact of it in our water.

The salt that is used to treat snowy roads remain on the surface so when it rains or when the snow melts, it runs into storm drains and ultimately into Maryland waterways. Environmentalists are always measuring contaminants in the Chesapeake Bay. A couple of years ago, researchers with the University of Maryland found elevated levels of chloride after a particularly rough winter, which is the main ingredient of road salt.

Dr. Beth McGee notes, "Chloride is toxic to aquatic organisms and so they're worried that the levels they're seeing could impact local streams."

So far this season, the State Highway Administration (SHA) has dumped about 400-thousand tons of salt on Maryland roads. They only use what is necessary but this unusually icy winter has required much more.

400,000 tons! Wow, sounds like a lot, right?  Well it is when you buy it by the ton.  But let's put that into some perspective.

The volume of Chesapeake Bay is some 18,000,000,000,000 gallons, or more than 64 trillion liters. and the Bay is approximately half ocean water, which contains 35 grams of salt per liter.  Thus the Bay usually contains a little less than 2 trillion grams, 2 billion kilograms, or 2 million metric tonnes of salt (a metric tonne is about 2,200 lbs).  So, in a worst case scenario, where all the road salt runs into the bay at once,  road salting has contributed about 20% of the Bay's salt, at a time of year when the salt content of the Bay is at it's lowest.

"We value the Chesapeake Bay. We want to reduce as much salt as we can, but the reality is we need to keep the roads from icing up," said Valerie Burnette Edgar of the SHA. Scientists agree that public safety is important but also hope to find more ways to reduce runoff. They are even researching alternative ingredients but they can be as much as ten-times more expensive.

The SHA "has experimented throughout the years and piloted use of different products and we're always open to trying different products. The reality is the tried and true salt is the best way to keep the roads safe," said Edgar. Salt water sea life such as crabs in the Bay can generally adjust to chloride but the freshwater streams are most endangered by it.

Not only do most of the Bay's organisms "adjust to chloride," all of them require it (it is an essential mineral).  And many of the the Bay's creatures are limited by low salt conditions.  Low salt concentration limit the range of oysters clams, and many marine and estuarine fish in the Bay.  

Road salt is somewhat more of a threat to freshwater streams; freshwater organisms, while requiring salt, usually have some upper limit of toleration that road salt may approach, but I have yet to see any data showing such an occurrence has happened, let alone is a wide spread problem

It pisses me off when the professional grievance mongers invoke the sacred status of Chesapeake Bay in such a misleading way to attempt to block something which is so important for the public interest.  If you don't think so, try driving on some of our roads after a snow, and before the salt trucks come.

Remember, it's not so much that they love the Bay, it's that they hate people.