COLUMBUS, Ind. — City street crews used “minimal salt” after this week’s snowstorm, resulting in the streets not being cleared as well as they would have preferred.
“On Tuesday, we hit the city streets with very minimal salt,” said Bryan Burton, Columbus’ director of public works.
Along the same line, rural road crews laid as little salt brine as possible on the asphalt until most of the snow had fallen, Bartholomew County Highway superintendent Dwight Smith said.
While both departments said they were rationing road salt, neither situation has anything to do with salt shortages – and everything to do with transportation logistics, Burton and Smith both said.
“The thing about that snowfall is that everybody needed road salt at once,” Bartholomew County Highway engineer Danny Hollander said. “The white stuff didn’t stop at the county or state line.”
In fact, the snowstorm stretched across 25 states, which has resulted in an extremely high demand on road salt, Hollander said.
Columbus ordered 1,800 tons of road salt, while the county requested 400 tons of the same product. Currently, it’s being stored off a barge along the Ohio River near Jeffersonsville, Smith said.
Since suppliers for several different counties are storing their road salt in the same riverside location, counties and municipalities have been told not to send their own trucks to pick up their order, the county highway superintendent said.
“The suppliers said if everybody sent trucks down there, it would just be a mess,” Smith said. “They just have to take the orders when they come, and work with them the best they can.”
Road-salt dealers are trying to split up whatever supplies they have, and give everybody a fair share, in order to ensure that nobody runs out completely, Burton said.
While it’s not known when the city will receive all of the 1,800 tons it ordered, Burton said Wednesday he was expecting a partial delivery of road salt at any time.
For more on this story, see Friday’s Republic.
