BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Environmentalists have long cautioned of the dangers of road salt on lake health. A recent report shows just how much time the state has to change course before the damage is done.
For years, Eric Howe of the Lake Champlain Basin Program has watched the numbers creep up.
“We see this as a canary in the coal mine kind of a message,” said Howe.
The stats came out this spring as part of the Lake Champlain Basin Program’s 2024 State of the Lake report that Howe helped compile.
“The chloride concentrations in the lake have been slowly increasing since 1990,” said Howe.
Salinization – or an increase in salt – can damage all levels of an ecosystem. Today, there are nearly 15 milligrams per liter of chloride in Lake Champlain.
Aquatic life won’t suffer until 230 milligrams per liter, but Howe doesn’t want to reach that point.
“What we don’t want to do is have to spend a lot of money to try to figure out ways to address chloride concentrations in the lake but we spent a lot less a long time ago to prevent it from getting in,” he said.
It’s no mystery where the salt is coming from. Road salt, used to melt snow and ice, is the state’s go-to tool to tackle storms.
“Unfortunately there’s no other products that we have other than salt to clean up from a storm,” said Dan Shepard of the Vermont Agency of Transportation
That salt trickles off into waterways that flow into Lake Champlain. To prevent runoff, the state started using salt brine, which is less prone to blowing or bouncing off the road than granule salt.
Shephard says it’s improved the application process.
“It reduces the amount of granular salt that we have to put down the timing that we do it,” he said.
Environmentalists are exploring salt alternatives from sand to beet juice.
Shepard says the state is open-minded but wants more info before diving in.
“A lot of these are new, and it’s gonna take time to see if there are any more environmental impacts on them because it might look like it’s working great at the moment, but there is some sort of environmental impact later on down the road,” he said.
For those looking to decrease local salt use, environmentalists suggest talking to your community leaders or private contractors about less salty deicing solutions.