A cargo ship loaded with road salt for winter-weary New Jersey is expected to arrive in Port Newark today, days before a barge is supposed to dock at the same destination with a shipment tied up in bureaucratic red tape.

“That is good news,” Joseph Dee, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said Wednesday. “This ship is not going to solve everyone’s problems, but it’s going to help."”

Dee said that as of Tuesday, the DOT has used 442,000 tons of salt compared to 258,000 tons for all of last winter.

International Salt, the primary salt supplier for the state and many of New Jersey’s municipalities, has a shipment from Chile due to arrive today and another next Thursday, said company marketing manager Mary Kay Warner.

Citing competition concerns, Warner wouldn’t say how much salt the cargo ship is carrying, but said it would be enough to provide its customers with at least a portion of their orders, which have been mounting with successive snow storms.

Monmouth County is one of those customers. Spokeswoman Laura Kirkpatrick said the county has only 400 tons of salt left – and that was primarily because of donations from three of four of its towns that had some to spare. She said 400 tons is enough for one storm.

“We are anxiously awaiting a delivery of the some of the 17,000 tons of salt that Monmouth County has had on order since January,” said Freeholder Thomas A. Arnone, liaison to the county’s department of public works.

Dee said he, too, doesn’t know how much salt the state will get with this shipment. In the meantime, a barge is on its way to Searsport, Maine, to pick up a portion of a 40,000-ton stockpile of salt sitting there for New Jersey.

That load would have been in Port Newark last weekend, ahead of the state’s Saturday night and Tuesday morning snowfalls, but New Jersey could not get a waiver from the federal government that would have allowed a foreign vessel to make the domestic delivery. Instead, the state had to comply with the terms of the 1920 Maritime Act that requires domestic shipments to be made by American vessels with American crews. The only vessel available at the time was a 10,000-ton barge.

Dee said although today’s shipment is arriving ahead of the barge, it wasn’t a waste of time to secure the stockpile from New England.

“We have enough salt for one storm and that’s it,” he said. “So the whole exercise of getting the salt from Maine is worth it.”

Based in Clarks Summit, Pa., International Salt keeps about two dozen stockpiles of salt between North Carolina and New England, but Warner said the loads in New Jersey were being depleted faster than they could be replenished.

Although temperatures are expected to climb to near 60 degrees by the end of this week, forecasters predict cold air – and possibly more snow – could move in by late next week.

Warner said that although the salt-laden ship is scheduled to arrive today, it could be another day before customers get their salt. And that’s speeding up the process, she said.

“As soon as it comes in, it goes right out the door,” she said.

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