Taking winter with a grain of salt : Lake Erie mines aim to keep roads and sidewalks clear. But this year, business is too good.

Across huge swaths of blizzard-stricken America this winter, a journey out the door, down the steps and across the street has often been perilous at best and impossible at worst.

Salvation lies beneath Lake Erie.

Although it is now the nation’s fourth-largest freshwater body, the lake was an ocean 425 million years ago. And where there once was sea, there is salt. The deposit is not pure enough for seasoning food, but when it comes to melting snow and ice, this stuff does the job.

So much salt was spread by local and state transportation departments during the recent storms that scores of them, from New England to the Dakota steppes, have depleted their allotment for the year, with six more weeks of winter to go.

The pressure is on, with harried bureaucrats jamming the phone lines at salt firms to beg and wheedle--knowing they need not explain the dire political consequences for mayors, county commissioners and governors if they are caught saltless in a snowstorm and traffic can’t move.

“This beats the winter from hell two years ago,” sighed Deborah Bowman of Morton International, who has turned down offers of flowers and plane tickets in exchange for diverting a truckload or two of the precious mineral.

In the subterranean cities rimming the lake, blasts echo nightly. Dark walls glitter with crystals and contrasting stripes of white, while front-end loaders lurch along bumpy roads polished to a slippery sheen by countless tires.

In “the pit,” as the miners call it, the temperature hovers in the 70s and 80s. But there’s no mistaking when the snow blows especially hard upstairs.

The Morton mine here, with tunnels extending below Headlands State Beach and a mile north under the lake bed, has been operating six days a week and alternate Sundays, 24 hours a day, since Thanksgiving. So have other firms’ mines with entrances in Cleveland and in Windsor, Ont.

Morton usually has 200,000 tons piled up here for the trucks to take away. Now there are 15,000 tons. “We’re basically empty,” said mine manager Richard L. Wilson.

Jack Vendi isn’t complaining. He toils in a maintenance shop carved out of a cavern, tending $3 million worth of parts.

At 54, he spends his days inhaling the prickly tang of salt dust; his skin is paper-dry; a constant thirst goads him. He leaves home before sunrise. He returns in the dark as well.

“We’re some of the few people in the world who are happy when the winter’s heavy,” Wilson said.

Vendi winked. “Detroit likes us, too, with all these cars deteriorating,” he chimed in.

At Morton’s mine, where no one has died since the facility began operating, about half the salt in the shaft is left to provide pillars of support. Steel rods are glued into long holes bored into the 1,900-foot limestone and shale roof that separates the mine from Lake Erie’s 70-foot depths.

Everyone who descends in the cramped double-decker elevator must carry a miner’s lamp and a respirator that can convert carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide in case of fire.

All spend some time drilling holes in a wall of salt, inserting blasting caps and tying explosive cords together.

“Face tamped,” warns a barricade once the job is done. At night, the detonations begin.

Then the loaders scoop out table-size chunks of grayish salt--”muck,” in miners’ parlance. A scraper moves in to peel more blocks off the walls and ceiling.

At a picnic table in a vacated “room,” Bart Torres ignored the hubbub in favor of his lunch. After 17 years, “it’s like home,” he said.