By Zorian Edwards, staff writer
On Feb. 21, students were alerted that snow removal procedures this semester were affected by the amount of salt allotted to Daemen. When compared to the previous five years, Daemen has been hit more consistently with snow, ice, and freezing rain. This has increased the use of snow removal supplies, especially salt.
“There is a national shortage of road salt. Due to the weather mentioned above, this has been the first year we have exceeded our full allotment of 130 tons and were cut off from our NYS contracted supplier,” Daemen’s Emergency Response and Facilities Services team said in an campus alert email, “In a typical winter we set up a contract for 100 tons and end up using less than that. Due to the shortage of salt, we have had to be judicious in our usage.”
Road salt is essential for college campuses in winter. It helps keep the roads, parking lots, and walkways clear, but is it healthy for the environment? Dr. Sarah Whorley and Dr. Jeffrey Law, both associate professors of biology in the natural sciences department are currently conducting a study on the effects of road salt on the environment.
“All this excess salt eventually ends up in our waterways – streams, rivers, and lakes – increasing the salinity where it should be consistently low,” Dr. Whorley said. “Increases in salinity can have negative effects on the organisms that live in those water bodies by affecting their ability to communicate, reproduce, and have a healthy physiology. Previous students at Daemen were the lead authors on a published study that demonstrated that increases in stream salinity caused the algae in those streams to have elevated omega-6 fatty acids – a compound that signals physiological stress. Dr. Law and I are currently leading teams of researchers at Fordham and SUNY Oneonta to expand on that early student work to cover more of NY State over the course of an entire year. We will finish sampling later in April. But we and student researchers Madelyn Casselman and Daniel Dzierzewski (both Biochemistry BS majors graduating this year) will be presenting early findings at the International Association for Great Lakes Research (Casselman) and the Ecological Society of America Mid-Atlantic (Dzierzewski) meetings.”
Daemen alerted students and staff about the situation at hand, resulting in joint efforts to keep walkways clear during the poor weather conditions.
“Daemen responded decently, considering that the walkways were mostly clear and safe,” freshman illustration major Emily McMahon said. “The obstructed parking spaces were inconvenient, but I can’t say that I have any proposals for what to do going forward to alleviate that besides stocking up more salt for next season.”