November 2018 marked the beginning of our first full winter season of Winter Salt Watch (we launched it at the end of January 2018). This winter, we encouraged volunteers to get a baseline reading for chloride levels before the first road salting of the year. With follow-up monitoring after snow events, any recorded spikes in chloride levels could highlight the significant impact of road salts (sodium chloride) and de-icers on streams.

Freshwater fish and other aquatic life can’t survive in salty water, which causes a ripple effect down the food chain. And water treatment plants are not equipped to filter out excess salt, so it can end up in your tap water - which is a problem for people with high blood pressure and other health conditions that require a low-sodium diet. Even in small concentrations, salt can corrode lead and copper pipes, leaching these metals into drinking water.

The League has already mailed out more than 350 free chloride test kits this season. We are also encouraging the more than 250 volunteers who received test kits last winter to continue testing chloride levels and uploading that data through Water Reporter to our national map.

Order your Winter Salt Watch test kit today at iwla.org/saltwatch to check chloride levels in your local streams this winter and throughout the year.

Due to our efforts on the Salt Watch initiative, the League was invited to participate in a Salt Management Strategy Education and Outreach Workgroup with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and other partner agencies in Virginia. The goal is to develop strategies to lessen the impact of road salt on waterways, including smarter salt usage by public works departments and behavioral changes among citizens.