State Agrees to Cut Road Salt in Adirondack Park

Our efforts over the past three years to convince the state to reduce winter road salt applications are paying off. This winter the State Department of Transportation (DOT) agreed to reduce road salt by 10% across the board in the Park and to experiment with four trial routes where new techniques and chemicals will be used to reduce salt even further.

AdkAction.org has been working in conjunction with the Adirondack Council and Paul Smith's Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) for several years to make the case to state officials and the public that heavy winter road salt applications are damaging the environment and costing taxpayers and consumers heavily for salt damage to cars and infrastructure. We have sponsored two well-attended, annual conferences to bring officials from the state, environmental groups and scientists together to consider solutions.

In December, 2011, NYSDOT met with AdkAction.org and the Adirondack Council and announced a goal of cutting road salt use in the Park 10% across the board, a total reduction of about 11,000 tons of salt. In addition, DOT agreed to set up to four experimental runs where the state will use alternative de-icers and slow the salt trucks to 25 mph (from 35 mph) to reduce splatter. If successful, this could lead in future years to adoption of "zero-velocity" spreaders that drop material at the same rate as the truck's forward speed. DOT also agreed to work with AWI to monitor water quality along the trial routes. AWI has proposed a continuous monitoring program, costing approximately $25,000, that would involve placing monitors in streams along the experimental routes both upstream of the roadway and downstream to get continuous readouts of results.

Full funding needs to be worked out, but ADkAction.org has agreed to underwrite the initial set for three streams shown on the map below:

To view pictures showing salt monitoring equipment being installed, click here.

We have made a request that DOT underwrite part of the monitoring on the remaining experimental routes out of savings in salt costs in the test areas, which would be approximately $58 per ton.

A ground-breaking study of salt pollution in Adirondack lakes conducted by Dr. Dan Kelting and his team at AWI will be published inspring of 2012 in the scientific journal Water Research.  A copy of the article, titled "Regional Analysis of the Effect of Paved Roads," will be posted on our website when it is published. But you can learn more about Dr. Kelting's findings on our website now by reading a copy of his presentation at our salt conference last summer.