Chloride is a growing pollutant of concern across the swbelt near the Great Lakes. This permanent pollutant contaminates drinking water, remains toxic to aquatic life, and harms vegetation. In Minnesota, the biggest source of chloride in water bodies stems from chloride-based road salt use. The amount of salt used on roads is driven by many factors, including public pressure for high levels of service, changes to climate, optimizing winter maintenance operations, and infrastructure design to drive down waste while driving up results. Over the last 20 years, the chloride management team listened to winter maintenance professionals’ complaints and their frustration in trying to drive down salt use. The speakers have used that insight to brainstorm design ideas with their engineers, planners, and landscape architects. If winter maintenance challenges are considered, they want to explore altering their design to improve results. Addressing the salt issue at the design level will help ease the burden faced by winter maintenance operations. In this session, the presenters will discuss the chloride problem, the role stormwater treatment plays in remediation, challenges faced by winter maintenance, and look at a few design strategies to overcome some of these challenges.

At the conclusion of this session, participants will be better able to:
• Recognize the chloride threat to our freshwater and infrastructure.
• Discuss the effectiveness of stormwater management to remediate chloride.
• Present new design ideas to engineers, architects, and planners.

Contributor/Source

Connie Fortin, Senior Project Manager, Bolton & Menk, Inc., connie.fortin@bolton-menk.com

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