It has become a popular pastime for some to make fun of
projects that are receiving federal stimulus funding: projects that seem
unnecessary or poorly thought out, or the ones the commentators just don’t agree
with. Here’s one that sounds funny but makes a lot of sense: a salt barn.
Lancaster, Ohio, will receive about a million dollars of stimulus money
for projects including this one (others under consideration are relining sewer
pipes, installing new boilers at city hall, and creating a wash area for city
vehicles and street sweepers). Many people who favor the salt barn are looking
at it in purely economic terms: Salting roads is expensive, and having a better
place to store it is expected to save roughly a thousand dollars a year. The
current storage area leaks, and that’s about how much salt is being lost. The
bigger benefit, though, will be that less salt reaches surface water. (The
current leaking storage area is near a creek.)
Salting roads is a necessary safety measure. Although alternatives are
being explored, such as substances that can serve the same function while adding
less chloride to the system (watch for an article in an upcoming issue of
Stormwater), salt will continue to be widely used for the foreseeable
future. The results can include elevated chloride levels in groundwater and
aquatic toxicity in surface waters, and these are problems watershed managers
just have to deal with—in a choice between safe roads and higher chloride
levels, there’s no contest. But there’s no point in putting the chloride into
the system before it even hits the roads—and to prevent that, a new salt barn
sounds well worth its share of the money.