SALT AWAY

WARWICK — The mountain of road salt loomed over Gov. Gina Raimondo.

Even a hulking state plow truck, parked like a set piece behind her, looked small next to the 20,000-ton stockpile at a R.I. Department of Transportation facility off Jefferson Boulevard.

Billed as Rhode Island’s “Strategic Salt Reserve,” it was worth more than $1 million and represented 598 truckloads of salt.

At the November 2015 news conference, Raimondo described it as a backup resource to help Rhode Island de-ice its roads in the event of an unforeseen shortage in the salt supply.

Three snow seasons later, in the middle of a fourth winter with hardly any snow, the reserve pile of salt is completely gone from the DOT facility at Jefferson Boulevard in Warwick.

The disappearance of that particular pile — and the alps of salt in Providence’s port area this winter — reflect a certain reality about the local economy for road salt: Heaps of road salt are coming to Rhode Island these days, and being handled by the DOT, too — regardless of snowfall levels.

During the winter of 2017-2018, when an above-average snow season brought about 50 inches of snow to Providence, the DOT says it sprinkled roads with 153,269 tons of salt.

That was actually more salt than the 151,065 tons that DOT says it put on roads during 2014-15. That winter about 76 inches of snow fell in Providence, and the DOT faced a well publicized salt shortage in Rhode Island.

This winter season, with far less snow than last year, the city’s port area has teemed with privately-owned fleets of dump trucks and payloaders moving salt that’s as white as an uncommon snowflake.

Some of that salt has been shipped all the way from Egypt to Providence, a destination in what is known as the “salt belt,” a group of U.S. states that spread salt on their roads.

Snowfall levels aren’t the best indicator of salt use, says the DOT’s director, Peter Alviti Jr. Conditions that are more conducive to ice tend to warrant the most salt use.

“Every time it rains, particularly when it rains overnight on highways and the temperatures are down below freezing, we have to get crews out there to attend to that,“ Alviti said.

“We deploy during the winter in between snowstorms ... pretty frequently,” he says. “Anytime you get precipitation or an icy black icing condition, our crews are out there.”

That's only part of the reason why the DOT can use a lot of salt during a winter with little snowfall.

Another reason, said DOT officials, is that due to moisture in the atmosphere, salt becomes “crusty and unusable” over time.

So a strategic salt reserve can’t be like the U.S. government’s oil reserve, capable of being held in abeyance over a long period of time until it’s needed.

“The moisture in the air, etc., can form a layer of kind of crust on the outside that we would end up having to reprocess it and crush it again,” Alviti says. “So instead of doing that, every couple of years we rotate that pile into our operations and then replenish the pile again.”

This is why the hills of salt that flanked Raimondo in late 2015, purchased at a rate of $58 a ton, were gone by July 2017, according to the DOT.

Keeping reserve amounts of salt on hand the way Rhode Island does involves additional hauling. Initially, the 20,000 tons of reserve salt sat for a while under a tarpaulin, says the DOT. Later on, it says, the state paid private haulers to transfer salt from the Jefferson Boulevard site to various salt storage locations around the state.

There, the reserve salt merged into the state’s primary salt supply, says Alviti. The state kept the primary supply of salt at more than a dozen other local salt storage locations at the time.

As the DOT depleted the initial reserve, which was completely gone by July 2017, the department established a second reserve, according to DOT officials.

This happened at a leased location closer to the Port in Providence at 288 Allens Ave., the same site where the DOT had begun to keep new bridge-washing and road-striping machinery, Alviti says.

It made sense to keep the second reserve salt stockpile there, Alviti says, because the department’s overall presence at the site was stronger than at the Warwick location and the property was flatter. It also made sense to keep a smaller reserve of 10,000 tons rather than 20,000 tons.

But now the DOT is moving out of the site as part of the procurement process for acquiring a new state-owned, non-leased location to store its valued bridge-washing and road-striping equipment, Alviti says.

For that reason, Alviti says, the DOT moved the 10,000 tons of reserve salt to the old Jefferson Boulevard site in January. Then, because the salt was getting old, within the same month, haulers moved part of the newly relocated reserve pile to other local storage sheds holding DOT’s primary supply of salt, he says.

During a winter with little snowfall, the hundreds of truckloads moving between various DOT sites didn’t go unnoticed. It was quite a bit of salt handling by the DOT.

Some truckers wondered why the state bothered with the intermediary step of moving the salt to the Warwick site when it could have just hauled the salt directly to the storage sheds, including the one at Jefferson Boulevard.

Alviti’s answer is that the site in Warwick seemed likely to use up a good amount of the 10,000 tons, “So that seemed like the logical place to bring it to I would imagine.”

At this point in the snow season, Alviti adds, the DOT has plenty of salt in its sheds to get through the winter without needing a backup salt supply.

Not all the states that use road salt keep reserves, says Alviti, whose department is charged with maintaining about 3,300 lane miles of state roads.

For each single lane of roadway, DOT applies salt at a rate of about 250 to 400 pounds per mile depending on conditions. At that range, a single application on the state roads takes just over 400 tons up to 660 tons.

The salt is purchased and initially delivered to the DOT for less than $60 per ton.

The supplier is Morton Salt — the same world famous supplier of table salt.

The Port of Providence, meanwhile, gained a new salt importer in 2018. Champion Salt moved in from Boston and now supplies three districts served by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation with salt from Egypt, says Jeremy Warren, who sells salt for the company.

The supplier has taken up a space next to the Sprague Terminal on the salt strip visible from Route 95.

"It's just a good local hub," he says. "Everybody is close to the highway."

Predictably, Warren lauds the Rhode Island Department of Transportation for keeping its reserves of salt.