Connie Fortin, long-time chloride expert, is focusing upstream on low-salt infrastructure design to reduce saline pollution.
After decades of saline seminars, dozens of salt symposia (which are a real thing), and personally training more than 20,000 plow drivers, Connie Fortin has decided it’s time for a change. She’s thinking big about reducing road salt in Minnesota.
Few people know as much about advanced chloride management as Fortin, who has spent decades running a consulting firm focused on the trenches and gutters at the side of the road. Her work lies at the intersection of Midwestern winters, infrastructure runoff and traction, a place that few people spend much time pondering. But it’s a problem that’s critical to the health of Minnesota water, as salt pollution has been steadily worsening over the past decade.
Now part of planning firm Bolton & Menk, Fortin’s latest work is aimed at reducing the big-picture problem of road salt, going “upstream” and re-thinking designs for roads, buildings, and infrastructure that might require less salt in the first place. The resulting salt-eye-lens is a fascinating new way to think about parking lots, overpasses, or sidewalks.
The problem of road salt
Much like noise or particulates, road salt is something people don’t usually notice. As long as the road is clear, most drivers don’t much ponder how it got that way.
In truth, there’s a great material cost to bare asphalt. Each Minnesota winter, MnDOT plow drivers spent around $130 million dumping 246,000 tons of salt on state roads. County and city crews add a lot more to this total – not to mention individual salters (like myself, this month) – which gives you a sense of the scale of the problem.
[image_credit]MnDOT[/image_credit]
Salt is the cheapest, easiest way of clearing road surfaces, breaking down ice by raising its melting point. Alternatives to salt include a bunch of different brines (salty de-icing sludge) that agencies have been tinkering with for years in an effort to reduce salt pollution. For example, potassium acetate doesn’t contain any salt, while another made from beet sugar does; in both cases, they work only in certain conditions.
[image_credit]MnDOT[/image_credit][image_caption]Most Minnesota road salt is mined from the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s long been a problematic solution to traffic safety.[/image_caption]
Low-salt infrastructure
Thankfully for Minnesota’s lakes and streams, most public works agencies have become more judicious about reducing salt use. The brines certainly help, and pushing city plow drivers to be more judicious about when and where they salt is what Fortin’s work has emphasized for years. But that’s not really enough.
“I’ve trained plow divers for 20 years, trying to get them to use science in winter maintenance and to be confident in dropping down their salt; we’ve done a lot of good there,” Connie Fortin told me. “But my new passion is, instead of trying to reduce the salt problem, to work one step higher in the food chain and design it away.”
Fortin sold her longtime saline management consulting firm to Bolton & Menk last year. In her new role, she’s been able to think bigger about salt. She’s excited to share the news of her innovative approach with anyone who will listen.
“We’ve brought to our civil engineers the real life problems maintenance people face and said, ‘let’s solve these problems; let’s design for winter,’’ Fortin explained. “We developed ten concepts that we are going to look at every time we develop something for cold climates. It’s so easy.”
I was only able to access five of the ten tips (the rest is proprietary), but thinking about infrastructure from the point of view of glaze ice offers a refreshing perspective. Fortin’s rules center on key ideas that seem like common sense, but reflect angles often overlooked by engineers and architects working on big projects. A lot of the work centers on getting ahead of the freeze-thaw cycle, for example, and preventing meltwater runoff in advance.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]A salted sidewalk on the West Bank in Minneapolis.[/image_caption]
Another one of Fortin’s lessons is to think about how sunshine and trees work, especially conifers. The angle of the sun makes a huge difference toward melting ice, and shade is a sun-killer. Make sure confers are planted to the north of any sidewalks or parking lots.
“If we could remove some of the conifers along shaded routes along interstates, and replace them with deciduous trees without leaves that don’t block the sun, we’d allow sunlight onto the road and we don’t have to salt it so much,” Fortin explained.
Other rules include thinking about winter sun angles, using permeable pavement to drain meltwater, and making sure that salt storage is designed to prevent runoff. It turns out that a lot of salt prevention is simply thinking closely about melting hydrodynamics.
Fortin’s principles remind me of earlier generations’ “design with nature” mantra, and offers to shed new long-term perspective on what is often, in the middle of a winter snowstorm, a very short-term problem. While reducing driving overall is still the most important goal for urban design, it’s also important to connect the dots between today’s icy street and the health of the river flowing just over the horizon.
“We need to do more than just put the problem on the shoulders of the plow drivers,” Fortin told me. “They can make a huge difference, but even if they drop their salt 50%, we still spend over $100M a year buying salt for our roads.”
According to Fortin, her program teaching Low Salt Solution seminars is the first program of its kind, anywhere in the world. (After countless salt symposia, she should know.) The program even has its own certification process, which is the kind of thing that engineers and transportation agencies love to embrace.
“I’m enthused about the possibilities of designing the problem, not away, but way reducing the scope,” Fortin said.
Here’s another tip for residential house owners. In sidewalks and driveways where the lawn edge is higher than pavement, causing winter melt to pool and freeze, lower the grass below pavement or remove it and put in a swale garden. This works well when the spot is also sun-exposed so when there is sun-melt the pooling is diminished as it runs off better.
Getting that snow off the sidewalk as promptly as possible, down to bare pavement, can make a very big difference as to need for salting. Some of the Rocky Mountain states may have lessons for us regarding roadways. Montana and Wyoming use very little salt on their streets and highways, although they’re helped by winter air drier than ours. Low use of road salt also means vehicles rust little and infrastructure last longer. When salt remains on the surface of concrete it tends to dehydrate and destroy the concrete. Remember, when new concrete sets, it’s hydrating, not drying.
This winter is/was exceptionally awful – lots of ice and refreeze, multiple aggravating nuisance snows timed to be impossible to deal with before the snow got driven down and hard packed on road surfaces and sidewalks, and wind-blown snow. Then there were the slop snows followed by plunging temperatures turning the mess into a granite-like moonscape. I felt my heart sink last fall when it became clear that this winter would be a third La Nina one, almost certainly guaranteeing a ghastly slog for the Upper Midwest. So of course we used salt – what alternative is there? Slipping and falling? Running off the road?
The best response would be to minimize the need to drive by WFH for as many people as possible, to mount a campaign to minimize car trips of all kinds when the roads are sketchy, and to plow the roads before they get packed down whenever that’s possible. While planting well- placed conifers and constructing infrastructure more thoughtfully are fine, the reality is that some winters are just going to be plain awful and drivers will need to be more careful – and preferably WFH or put off those discretionary trips until the pavement is clear. This begs for an educational campaign!
What does WFH mean?
This seems well-intentioned and I’m all for reducing salt pollution, but if the fixes all involve building new infrastructure or changing trees, they seem like rather long-term solutions to an urgent problem.
And as long-term solutions, they’re lacking in ambition to solve so many other problems that could be addressed by building new, redesigned infrastructure or planting new trees.
And the five of the “ten tips” are proprietary? I groaned out loud reading that—do I have to buy proprietary software or media to know generally what they are or do? What’s so secret that having it described in a news article level of detail would be giving away some kind of business value?
Color me a skeptic, I guess.
Just a minor detail from a chemist on your otherwise interesting article. Salt lowers the freezing/melting point of water. Otherwise ice would form above 32 degrees Fahrenheit!!
Experienced snow fighter here– if you plant along the north side of roads and sidewalks you will give the predominant NW wind a chance to drift your pathway even when there is no new snow.
Keeping trees from shading the pathway is smart. The late winter sun does a lot of work removing snow and ice.
This was a very bad winter for ice due to the rain and frost/sleet events that seem to be increasing in number.
As someone who used to drive a lot for work, I really appreciated the salting of highways, but if there are ways to reduce such salt and keep the roads safe, I would love it…but not at the expense of safe roads. Of course, if we had a viable alternative transportation system, definitely less salt would be needed.
But…it’s interesting that we are talking about salt polluting our environment but not the farm chemicals that have vastly polluted our rivers, lakes and even wells in ag areas.
Great article… good thoughts on the salt reduction. Thanks !
OK, but what’s the idea here? Are we supposed to tear up all the existing streets and sidewalks in order to install new designs?
Also, one basic fact that I think should always be mentioned in articles about this is the amount of salt being applied. As a general rule people throw way more salt down on their sidewalks and driveways than they need to. I think a cup or two or salt is enough to treat 2,000 square feet of driveway or sidewalk for instance.