BETTER THAN HEARSAY - Ragtag Winters Tale

MOUNTAINTOP - There’s a simple solution to all this mess with road salt shortages and highway departments scrambling around, trying to keep local passageways from becoming frozen tundra.

I first caught wind of the salt supply mayhem when Greene County highway superintendent Scott Templeton gave county legislators a report on it.

The county, like a lot of departments, was running lower than expected on the stuff and while Templeton said his department would be okay, it was going to require some finagling and more money.

Road chiefs generally purchase the salt in bulk and have ample stock in the shed for a normal winter. This one isn’t abnormal but it isn’t what has become the norm in recent years either.

Windham highway superintendent Gary Thorington talked about it during a town council meeting, last week, telling a story similar to Templeton’s.

“We’re going to make it. We would have made it without getting more but then we would have had to use our nasty sand mix.

“We’d be using old sand that wasn’t washed and we’d never get the roads swept clean this spring so we had to be creative,” Thorington said.

In a followup telephone chat, Thorington got into deeper detail about what happened with the salt and why, beyond the fact this winter has been a brute in terms of persistent, pesky snowfalls, ice and evil winds.

It was a rambling tale, starting with him saying, “this is definitely one of the most challenging deals I’ve dealt with as highway superintendent.”

I don’t want to quote Thorington exactly because he lost me halfway thru the ensuing maze of reaching out to other suppliers, dealing with the perplexities of supply and demand, and politics.

There have been State-level legislative changes in the competitive price bidding process that apparently turned out to be cluster fusses.

They involve the well-intentioned policy of buying American and barges of material arriving in Long Island ports, dispersing from there, and the salt mines out in the Finger Lakes region of western New York and…

It’s all over my head. The part I can grasp is the way a bunch of small town road crews hitched their wagons and got done what needed doing.

It went something like this…with Thorington describing how it began to “get tricky” for the town of Windham and then kept getting trickier.

Windham was allocated to buy 250 tons of salt for the winter, along with a 30 percent overage and once that mark was hit, the usual supplier told them they were on their own.

Thorington hunted around, joining who-knows-how-many-other entities in the same boat, finding a good stash at the Port of Coeymans.

It was the only place in New York that had salt in-house at a reasonable price but there was one little problem, and I can quote him here.

“They had the product but every tractor-trailer from New Jersey to Ohio was lined up, 75 trucks at a time with a 3-hour wait,” Thorington said.

Thorington was told there was ample salt, but little ‘ol Windham didn’t have the big trucks required to accomplish the task, and the supplier made The Gipper, as he’s known, promise not to hire a private hauler.

Stuck between rock salt and a hard place, Thorington got on the horn with his compatriots from the New York State Association of Town Superintendents of Highway.

While the name of the group doesn’t roll easily off the tongue, the members know how to hunker down and get done what needs getting done.

So the way Thorington tells it, “there were two days of literally beating my head against the wall, trying to figure out how to do this.’

Thorington huddled with Templeton and Kyle Conrad, the project manager for the county and says, “we pulled together all the resources we had and got 14 trucks ready to go in one quick motion.

“The supplier opened an hour early for us municipal guys so we had 14 trucks from Greene County up there at 3 a.m.

“It’s been painful the past couple of weeks,” Thorington said, and then the icy junk plastered the northeast, over Valentines weekend, leaving driveways and sidewalks unfit even for penguins.

Templeton, in a phone schmooze said, “this year has been a perfect storm of a lot of different variables,” noting the cluster fluff with buying American would up costing Greene County “considerable money.”

“It was supposed to help, not cause chaos, so hopefully [the State} takes a look at it,” Templeton says. “We’re in a good situation right now, We’re all helping each other out. We won’t let anyone fall by the wayside.”

Just another day in paradise for highway workers but it seems like Mother Nature is treating them pretty ragtag so I’ve come up with a great plan.

My plan is to switch winter storms to July and August, which is brilliant in my mind, but when I ran the idea past town of Jewett roads boss Bob Mallory, it didn’t sound like he agreed.

Matter of fact, Mallory didn’t say anything, just gently laughing as if he didn’t want to risk riling up the looney on the other end of the phone.

The salt shortage wasn’t hurting him too bad. “We only use 10 percent salt and 90 percent grit,” with Jewett’s salt and sand mix, Mallory said.

“I’ve used it forever. I like a little grit on the roads. I don’t mind sweeping it off the roads in springtime. This year, no matter what you use, you ran out. This winter has been a little rough.”

But seriously, I said to Mallory. What do you think of this July and August scheme, laying back in the hammock, sipping lemonade or whatever, watching everything melt lickety-split like a kid’s ice cream cone?

Humoring me, he said,”Nah. No way, man. I wanna’ be out riding my motorcycle but I can tell you. Everybody has had enough of this.”