GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK)- Winter supplies around northeast Wisconsin are becoming depleted, but it won’t leave Wisconsinites defeated.
“We’re all sold out of shovels and ice melt,” said Ryan Lindner the general manager of Green Bay’s Lindner Ace Hardware. “We sold water-softener salt over the last couple of days to supplement the ice melt.”
When there’s not enough salt to go around, many turn to alternatives like using kitty litter or sand.
It’s not just sidewalk salt in short supply. Brown County Public Works says there’s usually road salt in all three of their sheds. Two of those are empty.
Paul Fontecchio, Green Bay’s public works director says they’ve been receiving a steady supply.
Outagamie County has had to get creative.
“We’re putting stone chips down right now we’re just real small stone chip we mix that with salt and we do put that down at intersections just so you have grit,” said Outagamie Highway Commissioner Dean Steingraber. “We took a delivery of a thousand tons. That helped us build it back up.”
A thousand tons sounds like a lot, but Steingraber says it goes fast.
“Sometimes with those big storms you may go through 500 to a thousand really quickly,” he said.
Right now, they’re using salt faster than they can get more- which means they’re being conservative.
“We’re going out there mechanically scraping things off right now and pushing it back out on highway 41 and 441 we do put some down and the traffic does help push it down a little bit as well,” he said “But the rest of the roads, we’re not really salting actually we’re not salting at all just plowing and staying ahead of the snow accumulation.”
In Brown County, treating the roads has already used about 20-percent of the annual budget over the past 8 weeks.
County officials say.. they do have a million dollar contingency if needed.. but it’s too early to tell if they’ll have to tap into it.
