The Current Road Salt Shortage Is a Harbinger of Tougher Challenges Ahead – The Colgate Maroon-News
Colgate University students were granted the first “snow day” in years on Monday, Feb. 17 . It was a welcome respite in the middle of February, a month without scheduled breaks from classes or seasonal depression. However, the Weather Decision Group’s campus-wide email may be a harbinger of less welcome developments down the road.
While plowing efforts can clear most snow on campus rather effectively, it is rock salt, the kind you often see piled up in big sheds off the highway, that is most vital to combating winter-weather-related dangers. If you have been complaining about the lack of that salt on the sheets of ice that continue to underlay most campus paths, you are part of what appears to be the majority. Various (especially less serviced) parts of campus have been virtual skating rinks for months, not least outside my door at Parker Apartments. Has Colgate forgotten us? Not exactly. It could be, rather, due to the major road salt shortage occurring in New York state.
On Feb. 14, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a disaster emergency due to the shortage combined with the incoming winter storm.
“I mean, this is the worst weather we’ve had in a long time, in terms of sustained cold that requires constant salt on the roads,” Hochul said during a press conference.
The weather she describes has put serious strain on both institutional users of rock salt like the state or Colgate, as well as consumers, many of whom have been unable to find it at local hardware stores. Sure enough, I called the Tractor Supply located near Price Chopper, and they gave a resounding “no” when I asked if they had rock salt in stock.
Why don’t we increase supply? It’s logical to think that transporting rock salt all the way to landlocked upstate New York might be the problem, but in fact, New York is home to the largest operating salt mine in the United States. Cleveland, another city hit by salt shortages, even has a mine located directly within the urban downtown.
The real answer illuminates a fundamental problem at work here. For the most part, state governments and other institutional users of rock salt order the amount they need in advance of the season, usually estimating the tonnage and then ordering a bit more as a cushion. This type of purchase comes pretty cheap, sometimes around $50 per ton. However, if more salt is needed throughout the winter, they have to reorder and pay a larger price, around twice the original. Therefore, estimating the severity of a coming winter is imperative to supply the right amount of salt, and that is becoming harder and harder as climate change continues to wreak havoc on the predictability of our weather systems.
At Colgate, this is sure to manifest in increasing difficulty managing our harsh weather patterns. We are consistently affected by lake effect snow, a phenomenon originating from the variance between the warmer Great Lakes and colder Canadian air passing over them. As we experience record-setting warm summers, those lakes will stay warmer during the winter and cause greater amounts of precipitation in a more unpredictable pattern. That is to say, occurrences such as Monday’s cancellation may become more frequent.
The University administration will need to make appropriate adjustments, focusing more on managing varying conditions. While many of us lament the mundane and seemingly endless Hamilton winters, inconsistent bouts of extreme weather pose a greater threat to the normality of campus life. Resources needed to conduct that management will be expensive. For example, overestimating salt needs could end with a mild winter — like the ones we saw in the past two years — and, therefore, wasted money. Also, rock salt treatments produce environmentally harmful effects on water quality and wildlife. If Colgate wants to avoid these risks on campus, it could switch to alternatives such as calcium chloride. This chemical, while being more expensive than normal salt, is also even more corrosive to metals such as aluminum found on cars.
Existing issues on campus will need to be even more urgently addressed as a lack of salt and bad weather combine in the coming decades. Although winters may become shorter and shorter, the intensity of seasonal weather is predicted to increase as climate change induces more frequent polar vortex and lake effect snow events. At Colgate, the split between up and down the hill becomes deeper as uphill paths are left unsalted or rendered inaccessible, and driving becomes more precarious. In another case, the infamously expensive and small housing supply for faculty and staff presents a pressing transportation issue. What happens when current measures become inadequate to maintain the safety of roads between Hamilton and Cazenovia, for example?
Overall, Colgate will have no choice but to focus more heavily on assuring the smooth running of campus during extreme weather conditions as climate change squeezes vital resources, like rock salt. That said, maybe we students will get to enjoy a snow day more than once every couple of years as well.
