Transportation

Small town pins water woes on road salt – Sports – Sault Ste. Marie Evening News – Sault Ste. Marie, MI – Sault Ste. Marie, MI

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Small town pins water woes on road salt – Sports – Sault Ste. Marie Evening News – Sault Ste. Marie, MI – Sault Ste. Marie, MI

FISHERS LANDING, NEW YORK — Road salt normally helps keep the public safe. But in this small hamlet near the Canadian border, residents say it’s contaminating their wells and eating their appliances from the inside out. Worse, they believe the state misled them about the cause to avoid culpability.

Researchers from Virginia Tech, who helped uncover drinking water contamination in Flint, Michigan, think Fishers Landing’s problems were caused by runoff from a nearby salt storage shed run by the New York State Department of Transportation.

They also say the problem could be far more widespread than a single shed in a single town, with their analysis showing nearly half a million people across the state could face similar risks.

And while New York uses more road salt than any other state, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont use similar amounts of salt per mile of roadway, meaning residents there could be at risk, too.

Unlike public water systems, private wells aren’t regulated, said Kelsey Pieper, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Boston’s Northeastern University who studied the Fishers Landing area while at Virginia Tech beginning in late 2015.

"Worse, they believe the state misled them about the cause to avoid culpability." Our government would do such a thing?

PSTA begins construction on first inductive wireless electric bus charging station on U.S. East Coast | Mass Transit

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PSTA begins construction on first inductive wireless electric bus charging station on U.S. East Coast | Mass Transit

Inductive chargers work on the same principle that switch-mode power supplies work in your tiny cellphone wall charger works -- it's just a transformer with two loops of wire -- and while each cycle might not move a lot of current and magnetic fields are very weak -- if you cycle fast enough you can move a significant amount of current with relatively small losses.

Who Runs the Transit System?

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Who Runs the Transit System?

Once upon a time in the Great City, Hugh L. Carey, one of New York’s best modern governors, and certainly its most underrated, pledged not to raise the 50 cent fare on the subways and buses. Swiftly, the man Carey had picked to chair the system, Richard Ravitch, contradicted him.

The fare, Ravitch explained, was the difference between how much money was needed to properly maintain and operate the system and how much the state, the city and others put in. Math, in other words, not politics.

Afterward, Carey, raised in the gentle arts of Brooklyn politics, summoned Ravitch to dinner at one of the Governor’s favorite midtown watering holes. In the hardball of New York, the menu would be expected to include a dressing down. Which is why to this day Ravitch loves to repeat what the governor actually said next: “Dick, thanks for getting me off the hook. Don’t pay any attention to what I say.”

That was then.

This is now. “Train Daddy” Andy Byford came and went faster than a speeding A train, the casualty of Governor Cuomo’s penchant to “micro-manage” a system he is bound by state law to keep his hands off of.