As another deep freeze grips the Northeast, orders for rock salt are way up. But how to get it through winter's obstacle course?
Salt suppliers' trucks keep getting hemmed in by snow, their barges jammed in ice, their rail convoys slowed by frozen switches."Our salt supply is inexhaustible, but Mother Nature is really testing us," said Catherine Bolton of Akzo Salt Inc. of Clarks Summit, Pa., the nation's biggest supplier of salt for de-icing roads.
After a month of snowstorms, ice storms, deep freezes, high winds and freezing rain, plows and salt trucks are out almost around the clock in some communities. And salt is running low.
Cities and towns order more and wait for it to arrive, but the weather just won't cooperate.
"The problems arise when people decide it's not going to be a severe winter and they don't contract what they need," said Dick Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a trade association in Alexandria, Va.
The problem is with suppliers, countered the New York State Transportation Department. "Our supplies are lower than we would like them to be," said spokesman John Iaccio. "That's due to the salt vendors' inability to supply us adequately."
That's what happened in Philadelphia, according to the Pennsylvania Transportation Department, and it's turned into an emergency.
"We are down to one day's supply of salt," David Cohen, Mayor Ed Rendell's chief of staff, said Thursday.
"When the competition for salt got keen, our suppliers didn't deliver," said Lois Marasco, Pennsylvania Transportation Department spokeswoman. "We got a little bit here, a little bit there. That was eaten up in no time."
And it's getting worse.
The freezing rain that began Thursday in Ohio and Pennsylvania swept over the Northeast Friday. The foul weather delayed a salt convoy headed from upstate New York to Philadelphia, Marasco said.
Help is on the way - a 72-car train left the Cargill salt mine at Lansing, N.Y., Thursday and arrived Friday in Pennsylvania.
The cold that has iced roads and slowed trains has also frozen waterways: Fourteen barges loaded with rock salt got stuck on the Illinois River two weeks ago.