Road Salt

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" height=82 BGCOLOR="#111111" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#33CCFF" FACE="Comic Sans MS" ><B>Seven  Creeks  Roadside  Spring Water</B></FONT><B>     |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Seven Creeks Roadside Spring Water"><B>home</B></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id40.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Watershed"><B><IMG SRC="0720e0e0.png" border=0 width="14" height="14" ALT="up" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></A><B>  </B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="14" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="14"><B>    </B><A HREF="id278.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Watershed Critters"><B><IMG SRC="0710e0e0.png" border=0 width="14" height="14" ALT="previous" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></A><B>  </B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="14" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="14"></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=398 BGCOLOR="#111111" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <I>Road Salt</I></div> <div> The dangers of road salt were recently in the news. The information was rather myopic, so we dug around a little to find three articles. This concern was first raised in Canada in 2000 and we in the USA are just talking about in 2005?  </div> <bR> <div> These articles explain the future danger of road salt to our ground water, environment and our health. We did not print all of the articles because of their length, but if you read them you will learn that, in addition to lots of other stuff:</div> <bR> <div> 1. In northern Ontario and Quebec, ingestion of salty snowmelt is a major cause of moose/vehicle accidents because moose drinking salty water lose their fear of vehicles and humans.</div> <bR> <div> 2. Salt kills soil bacteria increasing erosion and increasing the suspension of sediment in runoff and contaminates public drinking-water supplies to levels that exceed standards requiring additional expensive water filtering. <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#FFCC33" FACE="Arial" > </FONT>These changes in soil conditions could lead to turbidity violations and trigger an automatic filtration order requiring New York City to construct a filtration plant at the cost of up to $8 billion.</div> <bR> <div> 3. There have been 12 reports of bird kills associated with road salt in the US, Canada, and Germany. Two reports involved kills in excess of 1,000 birds.</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> The alternatives discussed are other chemicals which are presently too expensive, and who knows what other environmental hazard baggage will be found in the future. The solution is quite simple. Develop tires and road system that needs no deicing, like studs that do not damage the roadway and using sand and grit and a road berm which collects the stuff to be recycled </div> <bR> <div> Road Runoff Causing Freshwater to Turn Saltier, Study Shows</div> <div> Sorry but all the links were copyrighted so you will have to do your own search to get to this one. </div> <div>  from the September 2005 <I>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</I></div> <div> Freshwater sources in the northeastern U.S. are becoming increasingly salty, mainly as a result of increased roadway construction and at the current rate of change, some surface waters in the region could become toxic to freshwater life within the century.</div> <bR> <div> Researchers studied three locations in Baltimore County, Hudson River Valley and the White Mountains in New Hampshire and found that over the past 30 years levels of chloride had risen and many urban and suburban streams exceed the recommended limit for chloride, which is 250 milligrams per liter and rural waterbodies exceed 100 milligrams.</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> Low-Salt Diet for Streets</div> <div> from the Joyce Foundation newsletter, Work In Progress</div> <div> Issue date: September 2005</div> <div> <A HREF="http://www.joycefdn.org/articles/enviroarticles/2005-09salt.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.joycefdn.org/articles/enviroa">http://www.joycefdn.org/articles/enviroarticles/2005-09salt.htm</A></div> <bR> <div> Clearing roads of ice and snow has become such a fundamental part of life in cold-weather cities in North America that more than 10 times as much salt is used on roads as is used in food. But when all that salt melts ice and snow off highways, it washes into rivers and causes serious damage to local ecosystems.</div> <bR> <div> "Runoff into the Don River can be more salty than the ocean," says Anastasia Lintner of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, referring to a river in Toronto that flows into Lake Ontario. "Freshwater organisms can't survive in that. When we have a spring melt the salt in the water kills a huge number of fish."</div> <bR> <div> To combat this problem, Sierra Legal Defence will use a $75,000 grant to work with a Toronto-based watershed protection group, RiverSides, to examine the ecological costs of road salts. They will then advise the Ontario government of alternative strategies that use salt more judiciously as part of a more effective strategy for keeping the roads clear and minimizing traffic accidents, while reducing ecosystem impacts of winter road maintenance.</div> <bR> <div> In 2003, at the urging of a scientific advisory panel, Canada added road salt (which has been used to assist in highway safety since the 1930s) to its list of toxic substances that can be managed under federal environmental statutes. That prompted federal, provincial, and local officials to reconsider their road salt policies. The Ontario Department of Transportation, however, has a blanket exemption from environmental regulations related to the 2.7 million tons of salt it dumps onto its roadways each year.</div> <bR> <div> As it melts ice and snow, salt is carried in runoff into local rivers, groundwater, and the Great Lakes. The amount of dissolved salt that can get into the water greatly exceeds what is healthy. Even freshwater has some salt in it naturally, about 10 to 50 milligrams per liter, but water with a concentration of 250 milligrams per liter is unusable for drinking and toxic to plants. Kevin Mercer, executive director of RiverSides, says some bodies of freshwater can experience salt concentrations of more than 10 times that level.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> "There are some small streams adjacent to very large roads that receive constant applications of road salts which have been measured in the 30,000 milligrams per liter range," Mercer says. "If you had four or five days of constant snow in an urban area like Chicago or Toronto, and there was constant salting, you could raise the chloride concentrations in tributaries that high. Eventually you start to lose species diversity. </div> <bR> <bR> <div> In the case of urban rivers, severe salt concentrations destroy the small support species that make up the ecosystem. We live in a freshwater ecosystem, and we don't want to become a saltwater ecosystem. Road salt is the ultimate example of chronic damage."</div> <bR> <bR> <div> Salt contamination is a concern throughout the Great Lakes watershed. Milwaukee altered its road-salting policy in an attempt to minimize the amount of salt that eventually washes into Lake Michigan. The city has reduced salt application on side streets and salts only when necessary on main streets, bridges, intersections, and particularly slippery areas.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> Other substances can melt ice, but those chemicals are expensive. Calcium magnesium acetate has none of the long-term impacts of salt but costs about 20 times as much as salt. Magnesium chloride is not as harmful as the more common sodium chloride but costs five times as much.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> Sadhu Johnston, Chicago's environment commissioner, pointed to people breathing salt dust, deteriorating infrastructure, and killing of grass and trees near roads as some of the problems caused by road salt. </div> <bR> <bR> <div> Chicago is working on ways to use alternative chemicals while keeping costs down, and last winter the city tested a liquid deicer used prior to snowfall. The 25 percent magnesium chloride solution is mixed with a corn-based substance that inhibits corrosion of the streets. So far, it has worked well in limited use.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> "The pilot we did last year showed that it does work but the cost is probably going to be prohibitive for citywide usage," Johnston says. "After doing the pilot last year we're looking at how we could expand it into select areas such as bridges, along heavily landscaped areas, and storm sewer areas that discharge directly into a body of water.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> "We recognize that it's of critical importance to keep the roads clear, and we recognize that there's an adverse environmental impact to excessive use of salt."</div> <bR> <bR> <div> Kevin Mercer, RiverSides, 416.868.1983</div> <div> Anastasia Lintner, Sierra Legal Defence Fund, 416.368.7533</div> <div> Sadhu Johnston, City of Chicago Bureau of Environment</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> In our May/June 2001 issue, Janis Keating looked at what cities around the country are doing about deicing roads. This article takes a close look at salt's potential impacts, with special focus on a single watershed.</div> <div> from STORMWATER, the Journal for Surface Water Quality Professionals.</div> <bR> <div> By William Wegner and Marc Yaggi</div> <bR> <div> The use of road salt as a deicer on roads and other impervious surfaces is the preferred method to promote safe motor vehicle and pedestrian travel during winter months. The most commonly used deicing salt is sodium chloride (NaCl), which is readily available and inexpensive and effectively depresses the freezing point of water to melt ice. But what are the impacts of road-salt application to drinking-water supplies and watershed ecosystems?</div> <bR> <div> <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#00FF00" FACE="Arial" >for continuation of this article go to</FONT> <A HREF="http://www.forester.net/sw_0107_environmental.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.forester.net/sw_0107_environm">http://www.forester.net/sw_0107_environmental.html</A></div> </td> </tr></table></body>