Reduce Salt

Road Salt Has Become the Acid Rain of Our Time

• From Science to Solutions: The Lake George Road Salt Reduction Initiative

  Under the leadership of the LGA, all municipalities in the Lake George basin have adopted a Memorandum of Understanding and Best Practices Agreement endorsing the need to reduce road salt use and the practices required to do so. This MOU then led to the creation — and significant funding — by the LGA of the Lake George Road Salt Reduction Initiative.

  Leading the way in the Initiative are the Town of Hague, the Town of Lake George, and Warren County. All are working in tandem with scientists from the LGA and experts from the winter management consulting firm WIT Advisers, LLC, and Viaesys, Inc., a developer of specialized technology solutions for sustainable winter management.

  To date, the municipalities are reducing their road salt use by as much as 50% per winter and saving taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in winter management expense, as chronicled in the 2020 documentary, “The Road Map to Road Salt Reduction.”

  The municipalities’ plow truck crews have gone through extensive training with WIT and Viaesys, and now employ best practices for using the minimum amounts of salt necessary while keeping the roads safe for motorists. In conjunction with these efforts, the towns and County have also become the first three municipalities in North America to earn the Sustainable Winter Management (SWiM®) Program certification, developed and administered by WIT Advisers.

• Teamwork & Technology are Keys to Success

  The towns’ and County’s efforts are founded on a proactive anti-icing strategy, whereby liquid brine (with just a 23% road salt content) is sprayed on roads in advance of storms. The brine helps prevent a bond from forming between the snow and the pavement, much like using cooking spray on a pan, and makes it easier to scrape the road clean. This is in contrast to a de-icing strategy where much greater amounts of road salt are used to break the ice-to-road bond after it has already formed. While some road salt is typically still needed during a storm, the amounts are far less. Both the Town of Hague and Warren County have recently installed their own brine plants with underwriting from the LGA.

  In addition, the cabs of the plow trucks are loaded with sophisticated GPS-linked technologies that record the temperature at the surface of the roads and also calibrate and track each truck’s road salt application patterns. Video cameras in the cabs and along roads provide a real-time look at conditions and how effectively the ice prevention strategy is working. Also, before, during and after each storm, crew members patrol local roads to evaluate conditions and determine where more or less attention is needed. From the cab and in the garage, they’re constantly sharing best practices and striving for continuous improvement.

  At road level, the trucks are equipped with Live-Edge plows, which are specially engineered with the plow blade segmented into a series of jointed, spring-loaded sections that move up and down to conform with the contours of the road, removing snow and ice far closer to the surface than traditional plows and reducing the need for salt. As a certified distributor of Live Edge plows the LGA has enabled local municipalities to purchase this innovative snow-removal technology at the lowest available cost.

  Essential to our Initiative’s success is the commitment of the local plow truck drivers, who have become our greatest ambassadors, always striving for continuous improvement in all they do and proudly sharing their expertise with their peers at formal events and in informal conversations.

  Also inspired by the Initiative’s success, the New York State Department of Transportation has implemented a salt-reduction pilot program on two heavily traveled state roads in the Basin, the results of which are being monitored by the Lake George Waterkeeper, an integral program of the LGA.

While the Lake George Road Salt Reduction Initiative is considered by many to be the nation’s best practices model for the public sector, research on the issue finds that as much as half of the excessive salt use in Lake George and other places comes from private residential and business properties. Critical to catching up with public sector progress will be the role of Lake Protectors directly participating in road salt reduction. Becoming a Lake Protector now will start this essential process.

Reducing private-sector salt use involves basic and proven practices that keep driveways, sidewalks and private roads safe while protecting the Lake, the streams that experience spiking salt levels at toxic concentrations, and the groundwater that feeds drinking water wells.

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Priority Actions for Residents and Small Businesses