Road salt contamination in focus for legislators

MONTPELIER, Vt. (Community News Service) - Salt can be found just about everywhere outside in the winter — cars, roads, sidewalks — but where does it all go come spring? The answer often is streams, rivers and lakes, something clean water advocates and scientists say is getting worse.

Chloride, a chemical that leaches into waterways from road salt, compounds in the environment, particularly in smaller streams and brooks near multiple roadways. Too much chloride can be toxic to aquatic life and corrode pipes and plumbing, among other things.

The citizen committee that advises the state on managing Lake Champlain recently told legislators that excess chloride in the watershed could soon require state or federal regulations.

“The chloride is really a looming thing that I don’t think most people realize … It’s coming hard here, and there’s going to be federal stuff coming down on this,” said Bob Fisher, member of the advisory committee and South Burlington water quality superintendent, before the House Committee on Environment late last month.

State regulators seemed to agree about the problem last year, when they stepped in to address Sunnyside Brook in Colchester routinely exceeding legal limits for chloride levels.

The state developed a plan last winter to reduce the chloride entering the stream and limit how much can be present in the water every day while still being safe. That limit, called a total maximum daily load, was the first in the state to regulate chloride in particular, officials said.

Now, Sen. Anne Watson, D/P-Washington County, has introduced a bill to create a state program focused on curbing chloride contamination from road salt by better training salt crews.

The program, housed in the state Agency of Natural Resources, would provide education, training and certification for road salting across the state. Watson chairs the Senate Natural Resources Committee, which has been discussing chloride contamination this session. Watson said she hopes the bill, S.29, can help reduce stress on wildlife as well as save contractors and municipalities money on salt expenses.

The Senate committee heard from various environmental organizations that detailed the rising chloride contamination across the state Tuesday.

Over the last 30 years, the Winooski River has seen chloride levels more than double, Lake Champlain Basin Program chief scientist Matthew Vaughn said in the meeting. As more and more waterways upstream of the river become impaired, those chloride levels have risen sharply, Vaughn said.

A speaker from AdkAction, a New York nonprofit that has run projects to reduce salt use in the Adirondack Mountains, described to committee members how it worked with road crews and citizens to tune equipment and prevent using more salt than necessary.

The nonprofit recommends public-private cooperation and teaching people ways to conserve salt when treating roads or driveways.

“Anywhere where we deploy these standards, and there’s buy-in, we’re seeing a 50% reduction in salt use,” Phill Sexton, technical advisor for the group, told legislators.

Over the last decade, the Adirondacks’ Lake George area has attracted much attention for its road salt reduction work. For many years, about 30,000 tons of salt was used annually around the tourist destination, according to the Lake George Association, and some towns around the lake have reduced their winter salt use by as much as half each year.

Craig Digiammarino, manager of conservation and stewardship efforts at the Vermont Agency of Transportation, said in an email that officials are aware of the impacts road salting has on water quality and aim to avoid excess salt near impaired waterways. The agency’s snow and ice control plan describes, among other methods, using brine instead of rock salt.

Mixing road salt with water to produce brine can greatly lower the amount of chloride used because it helps melt snow and ice faster.

But much of the chloride entering the environment comes through private salting of parking lots, driveways, and other property where there is little regulation, Tim Clear of the state Department of Environmental Conservation said in an interview.

Experts said people and companies salting private property might be using more salt than needed. According to the Lake Champlain Sea Grant Program at the University of Vermont, a 12-ounce cup of rock salt can effectively cover a 20-foot-long driveway or 10 sidewalk squares.