A prius-driving sheep in my local neighborhood got absolutely SLAUGHTERED in a recent email chain...

After sending a picture of salt from the water softener and saying how it's nearly a quart, endless complaints of minimal salt around the community...this was a response, sent to a dozen people:

"I could be mistaken but it looks like there’s a tarp/plastic liner down behind the rocks, perhaps for this exact reason. What has vendor said when you asked them about it? I will say this does show quite a bit of salt, but what are you seeing near that area that is poorly reflected? Is there obvious grass or plant damage? I haven't watched them refill the salt--maybe a small amount of salt is quite trivial and an incidental leftover from refilling.

There's quite a bit on the board's radar right now around community, and unless, like you said, someone in the building goes and cleans it up, I don't see this as a high-urgency item."

Her response: "The plastic is landscape plastic. The salt adheres to the concrete on the wall. The salt dissolves and leaches into the ground and surrounding areas.

Picture 1 tsp. Now picture 10 gallons of water. Now throw the 10 gals of water away because there’s no feasible way to recover it once the salt dissolves in the moisture of the dirt.

Once it dissolves and is in the ground or sewer (or seeps into the concrete for that matter and eats away at it. Have you checked the basement floors as well, when they deliver it there? Ask groundskeeper about the spills.) : it can reach our groundwater where we get our drinking water; it’s now toxic to insects, plants, fish and can create dead zones in wetlands. Animals that lick their paws after walking through there can be sickened.

I needed a shovel to clean up the salt today. Lesser amounts at the other two locations.

We used to find toads and frogs where our chute is. No longer. They are an indicator species.

We have enough people at community that we can do the right thing, Patriot's name. I took the time to clean it up when I had better things to do. In the time we’re writing these emails, someone could’ve cleaned up the other locations.

I don’t think we can afford to think that we can’t do this or that. We can easily afford to do these things. We simply must understand the importance. I bet the Surfside condo wished they’d thought it important enough to deal with their salt and water problem. We have it easy by comparison.

Let’s not be so complacent and dismissive."

And the most recent reply from the Patriot: "I don't think it's worth my time given your word choice, but there's limited credibility to your salt impact journey. This is not causing visible nor tangible effects on our community. You said it best yourself, you have better things to do. Whoever taught you that 1 teaspoon of salt can extinguish the population of fish in our wetland should be punished. As a matter of fact, I just walked the property and thought the place looked beautiful. I also saw close to seventeen toads.

This is non a Surfside condo disaster, far from it. And if you think that salt, wherever it may have come from in Florida, caused that building and only that building to collapse, you clearly aren't researching the right details

Also, calling me complacent isn't going to help, and I wouldn't consider anybody doing their community a public service of helping out on a board complacent."

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