I grew up in Woburn. When I was young I enjoyed frequent trips to Horn Pond to fish, swim or skate. By the time I was in the ninth grade the fish had stopped biting and swimming was discouraged. The reason? The City of Woburn had made a practice of dumping the plowed street snow onto Horn Pond’ s icy covering resulting in a skyrocketing salinity level and a plummeting oxygen level. It seems my beloved city was a bit shortsighted when it came to things environmental.
I now work in Boston and every day drive alongside of Route 93 in Somerville, near the Super Stop & Shop that used to be Somerville Lumber. The State Highway Department has made it their practice to store vast amounts of salt under the elevated roadway. The salt is piled to within one foot or less of the steel deck that supports the roadway. The Highway Department did wrap the support columns in black plastic to ” protect” them from the salt, but I have a strong feeling that the plastic is not really protecting what is underneath. The salt has been there for years and this is not a good thing.
There is no way that this salt is not interacting with the steel and the concrete that support the roadway. There is no way that the wind does not pick up salt particles and deposit them all over the underside of the highway. When it rains and is windy, the salt is spread hither and yon in a fine mist.
This amounts to criminal shortsightedness and laziness. The agency charged with protecting and repairing our bridges is doing more damage to them than any other entity. Governor Patrick should shake up the department and make sure that salt is stored in an environmentally safe fashion, where it will not harm our water tables or our bridges.
