Mountain of rock salt makes you think

Sometimes, when making our regular rounds through court calendars, city council agendas, and the myriad other documents we sift through each day, a startling figure jumps out at us.

Today, that figure was this: on the Mat-Su Borough Assembly’s agenda for tonight is an appropriation for rock salt. Just plain old sodium chloride salt.

Want to know how much we spend on rock salt in Mat-Su? Well, this year it’s $379,666.

We don’t highlight this number because it’s out of the ordinary. It actually appears to be quite ordinary.

No, what caught our eye is that salt is, in our experience, relatively cheap. So to spend $379,666 on rock salt means the borough is going to purchase, essentially, a very large hillock of the stuff.

If the borough bought it in bags from walmart.com, which it most assuredly is not, those bags sell for about $20 for a 20-pound bag plus $60 in shipping to Alaska. That’s 4,708 pounds. Two tons.

An Economist article from 2010 puts the commodity price for rock salt at $50 a metric ton. So that’s 7,600 metric tons, or 8,377 U.S. tons — if shipping were free, which, to Alaska, it most certainly is not.

And while that seems like quite a range — somewhere between two and 8,000 tons —actually, according to the assembly’s packet for that meeting, we are buying 2,632 tons of rock salt. Using an online weight-volume calculator, we estimate that’s 6,920 barrels, to use an oilfield measurement, or 1,439 cubic yards, to use a mining measure. By either measure it’s nearly enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool halfway to the top.

All this by way of saying there’s a lot that a lot goes on behind the scenes in the borough every day to keep local government running smoothly. Somewhere behind the scenes a borough employee calculated how much salt was used last year and started the ball rolling to purchase the tons required for next winter.

Passable roads on winter’s worst days requires planning months in advance, as evidenced by the borough’s need to appropriate money for rock salt now at a time when snow is the farthest thing from anyone else’s mind.

We don’t know about you, but this sort of behind the scenes look makes us appreciate the effort borough staff goes through on our behalf. And we think it might make us think twice before complaining too loudly the next time a snowberm gets left across the end of our driveway.

We’ll probably still complain from time to time about winter road conditions, just not so loudly.