In the search for road salt, these are anxious, slightly complicated times, and Glen Ellyn Public Works Director Julius Hansen is in the middle of it all.
His community is set to receive 300 tons of salt Tuesday and that’s it.
Like other municipalities, the village has a collective state contract that allows it to buy a maximum of 1,800 tons of salt for the winter. As a backup, the western suburb has a contract with another supplier for up to 600 tons. Tuesday’s delivery would be its last contracted shipment and leave the town with 500 tons on hand, Hansen said.
“That is all the salt we have readily available for the rest of winter,” he said, adding that the village uses about 50 tons every time snow accumulates. “We are running low, like probably everyone. Right now, it’s very questionable if we’ll have enough salt for the rest of winter or not.”
Hansen’s theory that “probably everyone” is running low on road salt rings true in some communities, though officials in other towns say they expect to make it through the winter.
Towns from Woodridge to Lake Forest are dealing with severe shortages, brought on by the combination of multiple snowfalls and deep freezes that have stretched far and wide.
And Tom Breier’s phone is ringing off the hook as he tries to accommodate them.
“It’s gone absolutely crazy,” said Breier, general manager of Ice Melt Chicago, a Lisle-based supplier of salt melt products. His company’s sales for January so far are five times higher than for all of January 2013, he said.
But a major problem is that regular suppliers have “many, many barges” full of road salt and related products stuck in ice on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers and Lake Calumet, he said.
“They can’t get them into dock to replenish what has been used up,” said Breier, who was able to find a supplier from Baltimore that will truck in the salt, a mode that will add costs to the customer.
“I feel sorry for these municipalities,” he said. “They’re at a point where whatever we got, they’ll take it.”
In addition, the frosty temperatures and winter storms that have dropped farther south this winter depleted supplies Breier normally could tap if his customers in the Chicago region need more, he said.
The Illinois Department of Transportation and some communities, including Downers Grove and La Grange, said leftover stores from last winter have helped handle this winter’s severe weather.
But those stores might be less effective against another complication of the extreme cold this winter: temperatures have dipped below the level at which standard rock salt can melt ice, generally considered to be about 15 degrees, Breier said. Temperatures below that lead municipalities to seek more effective products, including salt blends with magnesium, calcium and potassium. They work at temperatures as low as minus 25 degrees but are more expensive, Breier said.
Among municipalities, concerns are cropping up about the strain on snow-clearing crews.
“It would do a world of good if we got a stretch of days even at 35 degrees,” said Stan Balicki, Downers Grove’s public works assistant director of operations. “Our crews have not had a break. It’s putting a strain on people and equipment. They’re happy to get the overtime, I’m sure, but it’s challenging.”
Officials in Lake Forest and Libertyville expressed similar concerns.
All towns reported using an astonishing amount of salt this winter.
Chicago is down to about 70,000 tons of salt after starting the winter with nearly 285,000 tons, city spokesman Bill McCaffrey said. Naperville had used about 15,000 tons as of Friday, according to Linda LaCloche, communications manager for the city. Woodridge reported that it had used 70 tons of salt by early January 2013. This year, crews had used 1,400 tons by that same time.
At the Illinois Tollway, spokesman Dan Rozek said the agency began the season with 87,000 tons of salt and had used 60,000 tons.
“Last year we had used about 14,000 tons through January,” Rozek said.
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While representatives from those entities and elsewhere said they expected to have enough salt to last the winter, Libertyville, Woodridge and Elmhurst are mixing salt with sand to stretch supplies. Lake Forest is trying to conserve by limiting its salting to main roads, parking lots and hills.
Park Ridge is taking a similar approach, applying salt only on arterial and collector streets at the beginning and end of a snowstorm. Side streets will not be salted, officials said in a message posted on the city’s website.
The city has tried unsuccessfully to buy more salt, officials said.
Elmhurst Superintendent of Streets Jim Hirakawa said Monday that the city started the winter with 1,600 tons of salt. It has 600 tons on hand. It has ordered 1,200 more tons and was expecting a delivery of 400 tons of that order Monday.
“We have enough,” Hirakawa said. “We have to stretch it.”
In addition to rationing salt and mixing it with sand, Hirakawa said he’s hoping the city avoids more 1- or 2-inch snowfalls, which he said use more salt than heavier snows.
“We actually use less if we can plow, plow, plow, and then put down salt,” he said.
Chicago spokesman Bill McCaffrey said each “snow removal program” requires that an average of 10,000 to 13,000 tons of salt be spread on city streets, McCaffrey said. “We have enough salt,” he said.
Morton Salt and Detroit Salt deliver a combined 9,000 tons of salt per week to the city throughout the winter, McCaffrey said, and the city is in the process of buying an additional 15,000 tons from other suppliers for $1.2 million in light of the particularly rotten weather this year.
The city has spent $10.4 million on salt so far in 2014, McCaffrey said, in dealing with a winter that has recorded about 50 inches of snowfall.
“Our budget will remain balanced,” he said in an email. “We have reserves in the motor fuel tax, which pays for the snow removal budget, to prepare for extraordinary circumstances such as this.”
Tribune reporters Jonathan Bullington, John Byrne, Kate Jacobson, Melissa Jenco, Annemarie Mannion, Dawn Rhodes and Geoff Ziezulewicz and freelance reporter Joseph Ruzich contributed.