The use of salt during the winter provides obvious benefits like making the roads safer, making it safe to walk around, and keeping businesses, vital services and the economy open. However, winter salt use also causes a number of unintended impacts, which include impacts to our drinking water that are especially challenging for people on salt restricted diets, impacts to our infrastructure and property through corrosion, and impacts to freshwater fish and other aquatic life not adapted for salty water. A large and diverse group of stakeholders in the Northern Virginia region have come together to tackle this challenge by striking a balance between these benefits and impacts in a Salt Management Strategy (SaMS). SaMS is currently being developed by those stakeholders and will include among many things, recommendations and resources for winter maintenance professionals and residents to #WinterSaltSmart, education and outreach resources for organizations to use, water quality monitoring tools and plans to better understand the impact of winter salt use and the impact of #WinterSaltSmart practices on improving water quality, in addition to various other resources and recommendations to promote collaboration and overall improvement in public awareness and winter maintenance.
While SaMS will be under development throughout 2020, you can keep up with high-level updates by signing up for our newsletter in the “Stakeholder Engagement” box on the right and reading past newsletters hyperlinked in that same box. You can also read meeting summaries from larger stakeholder meetings in the “Meeting Summaries” box on the right. Additionally, all of the materials from the various meetings supporting the development of SaMS are available on the
SaMS Meeting Materials page.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to any of the following DEQ staff: