To avoid last winter’s salt crisis, Riverhead highway department is taking extra precautions this year

After Riverhead nearly ran out of salt for its roads last winter, the highway department is taking extra precautions this year to keep the salt barns supplied through the winter months.

For the first time in recent memory, Riverhead is filling its salt barns to capacity at the beginning of December, instead of waiting until January, when salt left over from the year before begins to run out.

The town is also looking into alternative suppliers that could be used as a back-up if deliveries from the town’s current supplier stop coming in, as they did last winter.

“We don’t want to go through what we went through last year,” said George Woodson, Riverhead Highway Superintendent.

Road salt was scarce throughout the entire county last winter due to shortages at Atlantic Salt, the company that supplies highway crews across Long Island and New York City.

Last year’s brutal winter with its record-breaking snowfall totals drained salt supplies throughout the county, leaving many town highway departments – including Riverhead’s – scrambling for ways to keep the roads clear.

“Everyone was in the same boat,” Woodson said today. “It would take two months to get an order last year, and they’d bring less than what we asked for.”

Now that Woodson is president of the Suffolk County Highway Superintendents Association, he can play a larger role in ensuring towns are adequately supplied for the winter.

Woodson has made arrangements with Atlantic Salt to allow deliveries earlier in the winter so that towns can fill up their salt barns before January, when snowstorms become more frequent. The town board yesterday placed an order for 1,200 tons of salt from Atlantic Salt.

Such a precaution, however, wouldn’t have prevented the salt crisis last year. Woodson points out that the highway department was able to fill its salt barns last January, but the numerous snowstorms that followed quickly depleted reserves while additional deliveries from Atlantic Salt stopped coming in.

“It wasn’t that we placed our orders too late,” he said. “The deliveries just stopped coming in for everybody.”

So Woodson is looking into alternatives. The Highway Superintendents Association is currently in talks with another road salt supplier that may be able to ship salt by rail to Yaphank.

“It’s a back-up,” he said. “If Atlantic Salt has a problem, we can go through the other company.

“You’ve got to change with the times,” he added. “If something doesn’t work, you have to have a back-up.”