Fox-Wolf Volunteers have been Monitoring our streams for Chloride this Winter
Salt Watch is a program of the Izaak Walton League that works to mobilize volunteers across the nation to monitor their local stream for chloride concentrations. Through their program, they offer free salt watch kits, a mobile app for reporting test result data, a salt watch pledge, a regional map showing monitoring results, and many educational resources on salt pollution and its impacts. We appreciate our partnership with this program.
Through this partnership, we received 30 Salt Watch test kits for the 2021-2022 winter monitoring season to provide for our local volunteers.
The Problem
From the Izaak Walton League website: “Road salt is everywhere during winter months. It keeps us safe on roads and sidewalks, but it can also pose a threat to fish and wildlife as well as human health. Fish and bugs that live in freshwater streams can’t survive in extra salty water. And many of us (more than 118 million Americans) depend on local streams for drinking water. Water treatment plants are not equipped to filter out the extra salt, so it can end up in your tap water and even corrode your pipes.”
Fox-Wolf’s Amazing Chloride Monitors
We started coordinating volunteers for chloride monitoring in the Fox-Wolf River basin beginning in 2020. Our first monitoring season was the winter of 2020-2021. During this season, we had 11 volunteers monitoring 11 sites. You can check out the map of their results by clicking on the Google Map.
The map allows the viewer to see all of the monitoring locations along with volunteer photos and infographics showing monitoring results. For the 2021-2022 winter season, we nearly tripled the number of monitoring locations by coordinating 33 sites throughout the basin. Our chloride monitors did a great job getting out to their sites for baseline readings and monitoring after melting events throughout the winter. Click to check out the Google Map showing results from our 2021-2022 season.
Local and Statewide Road Salt Reduction Efforts 
Many of the communities in the basin are actively working to reduce the amount of road salt used on our streets and highways. Examples of these efforts include using brine (a salt and water mixture) and pre-wetting roads prior to winter storms, properly calibrating salt trucks to distribute the needed amount of road salt, and attending Smart Salting trainings to learn best management practices for reducing excess road salt in our communities. Fox-Wolf has hosted these workshops several times for our local public works crews over the years. Spreading the Word on SaltWe have used the Salt Watch kits and volunteer monitoring efforts alongside our educational campaign about chloride runoff and its threat to our aquatic ecosystems.
These educational efforts are primarily geared toward local property owners who are shown how to apply the proper amount of salt, when to use salt or switch to an alternative, and to sweep up excess salt after melting has occurred. We know that in order to see salt reductions on private parking lots or continue to see reductions on our public roads, we need to change the perceptions of our residents first. Once stakeholders understand the impact salt has on our local waters, they can change their expectations of municipal salt use on roads, salt use on privately owned parking lots, and overall snow removal after winter storms.
Questions? Comments? Contact Kelly Reyer, Volunteer & Member Coordinator,(920) 915-1502 or Kelly@fwwa.org!
