By Steve Burns
Port Authority
The salt caked on your car, under your boots, and on the hems of every pair of pants you own, probably came from Brazil or Chile.
In a typical year, about 900,000 metric tons of road salt is imported to the Port of New York and New Jersey by three salt providers: Morton Salt, Atlantic Salt, and Prieto Enterprises.
While salt is available closer to home from places like upstate New York, Canada and the Midwest, the fastest way to move that much salt to our region without 2,500 dump trucks is to load it onto a bulk ship and send it up the Atlantic.
It spends two to four weeks at sea instead of clogging up highways and local roads in fleets of trucks.
Once the ship arrives, the operation shifts from global to local.
The salt is scooped out of the ship, sometimes by cranes mounted on the oceangoing vessel itself, and dropped into a funnel-shaped hopper on the wharf.
A continuous stream of trucks park under the hopper, receive a load, and then drop it off at a nearby salt pile. Between the three companies at the port, there’s space to store about half a million tons on site.
All heaped together, it looks like a small mountain range sprouting up along the waterfront, with piles reaching 40 to 50 feet high. Bulldozers carefully shape and contour the piles to stay stable, like a high-stakes sandcastle. Distributors often cover these piles with massive tarps to keep out moisture.
Just like at a local grocery store, things get busy fast when the forecast takes a turn.
On an active winter day, up to 3,000 truckloads of salt leave the port for their final destination. Things need to keep moving, as one major storm can trigger hundreds of orders.
The distribution is usually baked into the contracts between the salt providers and their customers.
Most of the time, the providers contract independently owned and operated dump trucks to make deliveries. Orders usually are fulfilled in one to five days. Customers need to plan proactively, since those trucks are often otherwise occupied plowing roads once the storm arrives.
When capacity tightens, providers prioritize government contracts over commercial ones, making sure major roads and critical routes get treated first.
That system was put to the test during this January’s winter storm, when much of the region saw upwards of 8 inches of snow. Forty-eight hours before the storm, about 275,000 tons of salt were on hand at the seaport.
Distribution hours were extended from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m., as a steady parade of trucks loaded up and headed out to brine the region, an area home to some 46 million people who live within a 4-hour drive of the port. One distributor alone received 375 orders totaling more than 190,000 tons of salt.
The salt mountains shrink, but almost like magic, they grow again. Five more ships are due to arrive in early February carrying another 265,000 tons, fresh from sunnier places.
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