WBTV 3 News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic for Charlotte, NC-Cover Story: Salt and the environment

Cover Story: Salt and the environment

By Jeff Atkinson - bio | email

CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - Salt is one of those things we have to have in the winter.  It melts the snow and ice so we don't go slip sliding around.  But consider this, as little as a single teaspoon of salt can make a five-gallon jug of water toxic.  How soon does it show up in our streams and is it a concern to our environment?  PrimeTime's Jeff Atkinson has our Cover Story.

Depending on the storm and how fast the snow melts evidence of a day's salt can show up almost immediately.. and we can see it.

"This is the continuous monitoring.."

Charlotte-Mecklenburg tracks pollutants in our storm water like nobody's business.

Olivia Edwards, Senior En of Storm Water Services showed us one of the 37 monitoring stations.. this one on Little Sugar Creek.. that keeps tabs of the health of our streams, creeks, rivers and lakes.

An elaborate system no one else in the country has.

"It's very important that we can detect any kind of potential problem immediately," says Edwards, senior environmental specialist.

Water samples are collected from inside a PVC pipe in the creek and transmitted 24/7.. back to the city county Storm Water Services office.

When Sunday's snow arrived and the salt spreaders went out.. monitors picked it up.

"Here we see an increase in conductivity."

A purple line that spiked.. a line that measures the conductivity level.. showing a chemical change has taken place in the stream.. when the road salt showed up in this creek.

So does it present a danger?

Rusty Rozzelle heads Storm Water Services' Water Quality Program.

"The monitoring that we've done here indicates no there's not an impact to water quality," he said.

Rozzelle says because there's so much water flowing in.. and in the system.. the salt's greatly diluted.. so there's no adverse effects here.

But other parts of the country which get more snow than we do are beginning to get concerned.

A Minnesota study for example found traces of road salt in the groundwater.

And found salinity levels in 40 Minneapolis area lakes have increased steadily over the past 20 years.

For us-- while not taking it with a grain of salt.. officials are more concerned about excess fertilizer spread on yards by homeowners who think a little will do good / a lot will do better..

And from oil from cars and other pollutants.  Anything dumped into a storm drain goes right into the creek.

Says Rozzelle, "The things that people do in their yards.. particularly coming up on the spring here is of a greater impact to water quality than certainly any of the deicing of the roads."

States are becoming more cognizant of the amount road salt they use.. an effort not only to be environmentally-friendly but because salt corrodes nearly everything it comes into contact with.

One group estimates road salt used in the U.S. last year caused an estimated 12-trillion dollars in damage.

Departments of Transportation are using salt trucks equipped with computers that'll calibrate the amount of salt they need and dispense it correctly.. it's reduced salt usage by more than 30-percent.