PENFIELD, NY -In a groundbreaking initiative to combat winter road hazards, the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) has announced plans to extract salt directly from Penfield Facebook group comment sections. With Monroe County facing yet another brutal winter, officials say the sheer volume of salty outrage over a children’s book has presented a sustainable, locally sourced solution for de-icing roads.

“We’re always looking for innovative ways to maintain road safety,” said an NYSDOT spokesperson. “And given the sodium levels in these threads, we may never need another salt shipment again.”

The controversy stems from last month’s Penfield School Board meeting, where outraged parents flooded the podium to protest The Rainbow Parade, a picture book about a Pride parade available in an elementary school library. Despite no record of a kindergartner ever checking the book out, that didn’t stop local Facebook groups from erupting into full-scale moral panic, with commenters decrying the book as “grooming” and calling for everyone from the school librarians to the superintendent to be held accountable.

NYSDOT officials say they’ve already begun collecting data and estimate that a single post about The Rainbow Parade can yield enough salt to cover 441 for a month. Engineers are currently testing whether particularly unhinged all-caps rants could replace road sand entirely.