The Water Log

Manhattan’s terrain changes each year as winter approaches. Usually flat, our landscape sprouts a few hills along forgotten stretches of waterfront while we’re not looking.

The hills are made of salt – the salt that will be used to combat the snow that may or may not visit us this winter and make our streets impassable.

The salt hill that first caught my attention was in the Red Hook Recreational Area in Brooklyn. It sits there in its grayness all year round, gradually flattening out, occasionally providing a teenage boy with a diversion (climbing it) or a way to show off (sliding back down). But when I went to the park a few weeks ago, the hill had been transformed. From a distance it looked as if the gigantic mountain was covering all the playing fields. It was massive to the point of drawing laughs, it looked so ridiculous. A mountain in the industrial heart of Red Hook! What was it? It had been sitting there all year in its reduced form, and no one had ever stopped to think about what it was made out of or why it was there. Now we would have had to morons not to guess it (although it took awhile). Salt!

I contacted the Department of Sanitation. Could someone talk to me about the salt stockpiles downtown? They were busy, preparing for the holidays (and probably tidying up the salt mountains), and couldn’t talk on the phone, but Keith Mellis, executive officer of the community affairs department, found a few minutes to indulge my curiosity over e-mail.

His answers are perhaps a little sparse, but you won’t find any of this information on Google. So enjoy.

The rock salt comes from South America (holy crap!), and is transported to New York City by truck (that’s a long drive). The Department of Sanitation begins its snow season with a minimum of 200,000 tons of rock salt (I assume that covers all five boroughs), and can order additional salt if necessary. They are already fully stocked.

You’re curious, I bet, about whether they order the same amount of salt each year, or if they have some idea of how much it’s supposed to snow. That would be difficult, since weather.com can only project a week ahead, but, it turns out, it can be done. The Department of Sanitation uses not one but three private weather forecasters: Metro Weather, Weather Data Net, and Compu-Weather, “and we find this system to be accurate,” writes Mellis.

Last year, there were 160,000 tons of rock salt left over at the end of the snow season. (I assume that’s because they ordered more than the minimum of 200,000 tons, since last winter was very snowy. We had over forty inches.) That salt stays in the piles until the next snow season rolls around.

There are two stockpiles downtown. I biked down to take a look. One is a lame little hill plopped in the middle of an empty parking lot in front of the Department of Sanitation site on the East River, just north of the Manhattan Bridge. The other is a more impressive stockpile that takes up about two-thirds of the salt shed at the Department of Sanitation site on the Hudson, around Twelfth Street.

The pile on the East Side is not where I expected it to be. I actually biked right by it, even though I saw it. That’s because a salt shed just went up this fall right underneath the Manhattan Bridge – a few months ago it had no roof, and now it looks like it’s completed – and I’d figured the rush was so that it could be ready when the salt came. But the shed sits gated and empty, and the salt sits in a pile under the FDR.

Maybe no one told the delivery guys that they were supposed to bring the salt to a different place this year? What is the point of the empty salt shed they worked feverishly to finish? The salt looks so much neater in the shed, like it’s actually supposed to be there, and is there really no better use for that empty lot?

That’s one mystery I don’t know the answer to. But at least now you can tell everyone you know that the salt they put down when it snows comes from South America.

Posted by Tucker on Friday, January 26, 2007 at 11:42 AM | Permalink