With a snow storm coming a Cambridge Works truck fills up with brine from the tanks at the brine mixing station at Danehy Park. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
A three-story-tall gate creaks open, and reveals a warehouse filled to the brim with brown crystals. It’s a mountain of rock salt.
“We filled this shed this past week,” says T.J. Shea, Cambridge’s superintendent of streets. Shea is what some might call a “snow fighter.” It’s his job to keep roads dry all winter using this salt at Cambridge’s Public Works facility in Danehy Park. There’s more than a thousand tons of salt here – equal in weight to about nine blue whales. But Shea says it won’t last long.