The tenth annual Salt Summit, hosted and co-sponsored by Lake George Waterkeeper Chris Navitsky every year since its inception, was held at the Fort William Henry Conference Center in Lake George on September 24.
Ten years ago, salt levels in Lake George and its tributaries were rising, largely because of the unrestrained use of road salt on highways, streets, parking lots and driveways over the previous thirty years, according to the Lake George Association, a co-sponsor of the Summit since its merger with The Fund for Lake George in 2021.
“Lake George, one of the cleanest, clearest lakes in the nation was changing, and not in a good way. Sodium chloride had started to change the lake’s chemical makeup and its ecosystem,” the LGA stated.
Especially alarming to the Waterkeeper, the LGA, the Darrin Fresh Water Institute and the Jefferson Project: the amount of road salt spilling into the tributaries of Lake George, the source, by volume, of 55% of lake’s waters. That caused the chlorides in Lake George to triple from 1980 to 2010.
“Surface waters and streams run along the roadways of the watershed, where they pick up the sodium chloride in the runoff,” Chris Navitsky explained.
According to Navitsky, sodium chloride concentrations in West Brook, downstream from the Northway and Route 9, doubled over 50 years. Sodium chloride levels in Finkle Brook, which flows through the hamlet of Bolton Landing on its way to Lake George, increased by a multiple of eight over the same five decades.
A highly soluble compound, sodium chloride leaches into groundwater and wetlands, affecting plant and wildlife and, once it reaches lead pipes and drinking wells, human health.
When sodium interacts with the calcium, magnesium and potassium in the soils, calcium is released into tributaries, building micro-environments at their outlets where Zebra mussels and Asian clams can thrive, explained Dr. Jim Sutherland, the expert on non-point source solution with whom Navitsky has monitored Lake George’s tributaries over the past 12 years.
“Sodium chloride disappears, but it does not stop working,” said Sutherland.
A Commitment to Do Better
“Ten years ago, we started discussing this issue with our elected officials and highway superintendents; we made a commitment to do better for our communities and for our lake,” said Navitsky.
That collective agreement “to do better for our communities and our lake” led to the first Salt Summit, held at the Sagamore in Bolton Landing in September, 2015. It assembled, in one place, not only representatives of the eight municipalities, three counties and the state agency responsible for maintaining the watershed’s winter roads, but the most advanced expertise, equipment and technology.
Among other things, local officials approved a “Memorandum of Understanding” agreeing to reduce their use of road salt on winter roads.
“What’s made this initiative so special is the way we’ve all come together to face this challenge head-on,” said Lake George Supervisor Vinnie Crocitto.
“It truly has been a decade of progress,” said Navitsky.
Science to Solutions
Decades of scientific data illustrated the many ways in which the excessive use of road salt impacts water quality in the Lake George watershed. The annual Salt Summit introduced the tools to reduce it.
“The Lake George watershed has become a model of how to gain a community-wide consensus to reduce the use of road salt,” said Phil Sexton, the managing director of a firm retained by the Waterkeeper to help implement salt-reduction strategies. “This is a model on a national scale.”
By adopting new technologies and techniques, such as live-edge plows that conform to a road’s erratic surfaces and the salty, liquid solution known known as brine, which acts as a de-icing agent in advance of a storm, communities have managed to cut their snow and ice removal costs by as much as 50%.
“Rather than salt levels tripling, as they did from 1980 to 2010, we see them plateauing. And the hard work of everyone who has participated in these summits over the past ten years is at least partially responsible for that,” said Chris Navitsky.
Lake George is Headed in the Right Direction
According to Dr. Jim Sutherland, Chris Navitsky and the co-authors of their forthcoming scientific article, “The Chemical Evolution of Tributaries to Lake George,” which they summarized at the summit, sodium chloride and the concentrations of calcium, magnesium and potassium released after interacting with sodium chloride, “will impact tributaries and the lake for more than a decade,” that is, long after the use of road salt has been significantly reduced.
“It will take a long time for Lake George to recover, but it’s headed in the right direction,” said Dr. S. A. Norton, one of the paper’s co-authors.
