A salt spreader treats a side street in Homewood Tuesday afternoon as the area received its first measurable snow of the season. The wet snow made streets slick and travel slow.
“You can’t predict what the weather is going to do, so we start the snow season with 425,000 tons of salt,” said Cole Stallard, the city’s commissioner of Streets and Sanitation. “That’s our comfort level to feel safe getting through the snow season, which runs from Nov. 1 through April.” Heading into winter, the city’s stockpiles grow. So do the bulk stockpiles along the Calumet River and elsewhere along Chicago area waterways. These swell to enormous proportions, fed by barges that make their way up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers or through the St. Lawrence seaway and Great Lakes.
“Salt is not a high-priced commodity, but it’s a necessary commodity,” said Del Wilkins, chairman of the American Waterways Operators. “It mostly moves in spring and summer, but during a heavy winter, we’ll see salt moving on the waterways as well.” National Salt has no storage area for the salt it sells but remains undaunted as far as serving customers in the face of possible supply chain issues.