Salt mine closure will impact Mahoning County, engineer says

Mahoning County is facing a major shortage of road salt after the closure of a Cleveland-area salt mine, according to County Engineer Pat Ginnetti.

“It's been three weeks now since the announcement, and there's really not a solid answer on what the solution is,” Ginnetti said Thursday morning in a video appearance at the county commissioners’ board meeting.

Morton Salt announced in late October that it had ceased underground operations at its salt mine in Fairport Harbor after a “significant inflow of water” into the mine. No employees were injured in the incident, but dozens were laid off, and it has jeopardized the delivery of tens of thousands of tons of salt across six Northeast Ohio counties.

According to Ginnetti, Morton has reported having roughly 50,000 tons of salt on the ground — approximately 25-30% of the total contracted amount — and it is proposing to portion that out to communities in the six counties.

In Mahoning County, that would mean receiving about 2,500 tons of salt instead of 8,000-10,000 tons. Ginnetti said he is pushing the Ohio Department of Transportation, which holds the contract, for answers.

Since it is already November, the cost to get more salt elsewhere “would probably be four to five times more than what our contracted price is, if not higher than that,” Ginnetti predicted.

“We're certainly not going to be able to find another supplier that has the quantity or the price that that we committed to, or were committed to through the ODOT salt contract,” Ginnetti said. “So we are in a lot of discussions trying to determine how we're going to handle this.”

In a previous statement, an ODOT spokesperson said the department is “confident” it will have enough salt this year, with 73% of its statewide storage already on hand.

Some road salt is left over from last year, and 21 News’ Storm Tracker team is forecasting a warmer winter this year due to El Niño weather patterns, but Ginnetti said that doesn’t necessarily mean less salt will be used.

“When you have higher temperatures, oftentimes you have a lot of freeze-thaw events, and whenever you have overnight freezing, we're going out using a lot of salt,” Ginnetti said. “Last year was an anomaly winter where it was bitter cold for long extended periods. We were mostly pushing snow, not salting as much. The year prior was a mild winter, but we went through a lot of material.”

The problem could even extend beyond this year, he told commissioners.

“Rumor is, the mine may not reopen,” Ginnetti said. “So this is going to probably be a problem that's going to hit us every year. And you know, last year we had an issue with with production. They were only producing about 50%. Now this year the entire mine's closed.”

21 News reported in October that the shortage is also causing problems for road departments in Trumbull County. Columbiana County, because it contracts with a different salt company, is not affected.

Salt mine closure will impact Mahoning County, engineer says

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