New Online Storymap Shares Chittenden County Road Salting Practices and Resources for Sustainable Salting

Road foremen, their crews, and others interested in municipal road salting practices can now access an online StoryMap to learn about sustainable road salting practices. This interactive website summarizes practices used by 11 Chittenden County (VT) communities to manage snow and ice during winter months, identifies existing successes, and provides additional opportunities for adoption of improved sustainable salting practices.

Over the past year, Kris Stepenuck, Extension Associate Professor at the University of Vermont, and Associate Director and Extension Leader with Lake Champlain Sea Grant, conducted interviews with highway supervisors and road foremen across Vermont’s most urbanized county to understand communities’ road salt application practices. In conversations with the road foremen, Stepenuck explored each community’s existing use of sustainable salting practices (i.e., those that help reduce use of salt), and the motivations and barriers communities indicate for adopting additional sustainable salt practices. In the StoryMap, findings from these interviews are presented in a series of graphs with supporting text users see as they scroll through. Dana Allen with FluidState Consulting designed the StoryMap, which also includes interactive maps of the county’s roads and pathways maintained by these communities for winter use.

“Using StoryMaps to communicate both spatial and non-spatial information in a dynamic, interactive way provides communities and stakeholders with a valuable, shareable online resource to better understand issues and opportunities. With chloride from road salt increasingly impacting our waterways and presenting a significant challenge to accomplishing our clean water goals in Vermont, sharing information that could help solve this is critical,” said Allen.

The StoryMap provides a glimpse into the current road salting practices of these communities. Chittenden County has seven streams listed as impaired for chloride as designated by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (VTDEC). The impairments are caused primarily by road salting. Once a waterbody is impaired, the Federal Clean Water Act requires that a plan be developed to minimize pollution by the identified contaminant. Vermont and the municipalities in which these streams are located are legally required to reduce chloride pollution to these waterways.  

“By knowing the practices communities are using now, we can later assess progress made by communities to adopt sustainable salting practices that help reduce their use of salt,” said Stepenuck. “The information we learned from the highway supervisors and road foremen also identified the information and training needs of these communities so that resources can be developed to be most useful to communities to help them reduce use of salt.”

Luckily, there are a variety of sustainable practices that can be employed to reduce use of salt that also ensure public safety is maintained. Salt reduction is critical in abating chloride pollution as there are few feasible Best Management Practices (BMPs) that can remove chloride from stormwater runoff.

Stepenuck asked road foremen about their use of such practices, finding that most communities use equipment that allows for salt distribution to be adjusted based on conditions. On the other hand, only half of the communities interviewed measure pavement temperatures, which is one of the most economical pieces of technology in which a community can invest to help reduce use of salt. Knowing the pavement temperature at any given location can allow a plow driver to salt or not salt as needed. If they observe that pavement is already above freezing and the day is forecast to be warm, they can skip salting for most or all of a route, which can significantly reduce overall use of salt.

Similarly, Stepenuck found that just over half of the communities were using segmented and/or secondary plows at the time of their interview. These specialized plows have multiple short segments. Since road surfaces are often uneven, the ability for these individual segments to react to road surfaces individually helps to scrape the pavement cleaner than a single bladed plow. Creating a cleaner road surface allows for less salt to be spread to do its job to lower the freezing point of water and minimize ice formation on that surface.

The StoryMap includes embedded videos that demonstrate use of sustainable practices by local communities including South Burlington and Milton. Another video shares the success of Hyde Park, VT, which reduced its road salt use by about 40% by adopting just a few sustainable practices. This saved the community money and allowed the road crew to further invest in sustainable practice technologies.

The StoryMap also includes a series of fact sheets that describe sustainable road salting practices that communities can adopt. Each fact sheet highlights benefits, challenges, costs and considerations for communities considering adopting a single practice. Each fact sheet also includes a listing of manufacturers of the equipment needed to implement the practice and includes a list of communities and businesses that use the practice. The goal is to allow the winter maintenance professionals to talk with and learn from one another if they know who is using the practice currently.

The StoryMap also describes Five Key Findings that influenced the adoption of sustainable road salting practices in the communities that were interviewed. They are:

• Maintaining Public Safety
• Public Education.
• Funding for Technology and Equipment
• Support from Leaders
• More Staff and Training

More details about each of these findings are available on the StoryMap.

“I am grateful to the road foremen for taking time to share their current practices, as well as their motivations and barriers to adopt sustainable salting practices with me,” said Stepenuck. “Their input helps us define future education and outreach efforts that will hopefully result in less salt being used across the Lake Champlain Basin, Vermont, and beyond.”

The data that inform the StoryMap and the StoryMap itself were created with funding support from the Lintilhac Foundation. Resources that are included in the StoryMap were created with funding support of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Lake Champlain Basin Program. More information about sustainable salting practices is available on the Salt Savvy Champlain website hosted by Lake Champlain Sea Grant.