Towns watch salt supplies melt away

. -- When the first thief drove off with nearly a ton of rock salt last month, pilfered from a road de-icing firm’s supply stored behind a strip mall, local police officers in this affluent Chicago northwestern suburb were flabbergasted.

“It was so strange,” said Buffalo Grove Police Commander Steve Husak. “Salt?”

Then, as winter storms continued to bombard the Midwest with snow and sleet, there were reports of a second salt heist. This time, thieves scooped some from a towering mound of white crystals protected from the elements and greedy hands by only a few plastic tarps.

Days later, there was word of a third looting. Then a fourth.

“I’ve been here 19 years, and I cannot recall thefts like that ever happening before,” said Husak, whose department has intensified patrols of area salt stockpiles in this town of about 43,000. “It’s a sign of the weather, and the economic times.”

With one of the worst winters in recent history pummeling much of the United States, particularly the Midwest and the Northeast, many local governments are finding themselves in short supply of this cold-weather staple.

Keeping roads clear -- and safe for driving rather than sledding -- usually means putting them on a steady diet of rock salt, which lowers the freezing point of water and helps prevent icy buildup.

This year, hundreds of municipalities are turning to sand, brine and other ingredients to stretch their dwindling salt supplies. At the same time, public works officials say they are scrambling to find new salt stashes -- and often paying suppliers double or more their normal price.

Although spring officially arrives in less than two weeks, it still looks like the dead of winter across parts of the nation.

More than a foot of snow buried parts of Ohio on Saturday, and covered swaths of Arkansas and Tennessee in recent days, stranding passengers at airports and stranding drivers for hours in whiteout conditions.

This storm once again forced communities to dip into their dwindling supplies of salt. Some Ohio cities -- including Akron, Cincinnati and Columbus -- have stretched this winter’s stockpile by adding beet juice to the mix.

Many towns are trying to find a solution to the unexpected seasonal problem.

The City Council in Fort Wayne, Ind., recently approved spending nearly $250,000 to hunt down and buy more salt. Officials in communities outside Indianapolis have been begging neighboring towns for their salt leftovers.

In Colchester, Vt., public works staff has started using far more sand than salt on roadways, up to 75% of the time, said Bryan Osborne, the city’s director of public works.

“Using sand instead of salt is like a carpenter trying to hammer a nail with a pair of pliers. It’s not a great solution, but it’s a solution,” Osborne said. “It also creates a huge task for us in the spring, when the snow melts and we have to clean up the sand before it gets into our storm water systems.”

The salt woes stem from the frequency of this winter’s bitter storms, which have dropped record levels of snow in some parts of the country. The additional snow, and the number of storms, ate away at supplies faster than cities expected, said Dick Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a trade association that represents owners of salt manufacturers in the United States and Canada. “The orders were a bit lighter than the storms needed,” Hanneman said.

Public works officials across the country argue that the problem isn’t simply how much they’ve ordered, but that the salt has not been reliably delivered on time.

Over the last decade, the industry has shipped an average of 16 million tons of salt a year for U.S. roads. Most of that travels by barge, rail or truck.

But this year, blizzard conditions delayed trucks on highways. Freezing temperatures occasionally made the Great Lakes impassable for supply ships, while ice on the Illinois River delayed barges from reaching northern destinations.

Such sluggish access to fresh supplies has been just one of the many hurdles Jeffrey Mantes, Milwaukee’s public works commissioner, has faced this year. So much snow has fallen in the southeastern corner of Wisconsin that Mantes now dreads checking the daily weather report.

Since the beginning of winter, Milwaukee has seen at least 80 inches of snow.

“We had 37 inches of snow in December alone,” Mantes said. “We normally get 12.”

So it’s no surprise that Milwaukee has already used up its normal stockpile of 55,000 tons of salt -- as well as all but a quarter of the additional 45,000 tons Mantes’ office bought late last year.

That additional demand for salt is also straining his department’s already tight budget, and prompted one City Council member to propose an unlikely solution: to hire temporary workers to clear crosswalks and bus stops with shovels after a storm has passed.

Mantes finds the idea somewhat absurd.

“That would cost us five times the amount we usually spend,” Mantes said. “Even if we could afford to pay all those folks, that’s assuming you could even find more than a thousand people to stand outside in pretty brutal conditions and shovel for hours.”

Buffalo Grove, too, has had to skimp.

Crews no longer pre-treat the village’s 120 miles of roadways before a storm, said Richard Kuhl, supervisor of public works operations. Kuhl found a supplier in Chicago to sell the village salt at $155 per ton -- compared with the $40.20 a ton it usually pays.

And police officials are keeping a close eye on the village’s salt pile. After all, thieves earlier this year spirited off some of the salt stored behind a shopping center in the nearby village of Schaumburg, about 30 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.

Husak, of the Buffalo Grove Police Department, isn’t too worried.

“Our Police Department headquarters sits across the street from the public works office,” Husak said.

“We can see their salt from our front door, and we’re watching over it.”

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p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com