LYONS ? Trucks are lined up bumper-to-bumper these days along the road leading to the Lyons Salt Co. In the frosty, salt-scented air, drivers pass the hours waiting for the loads of road salt they will deliver throughout the Midwest.

Winter is always boom time for road salt producers in the nation’s fourth biggest salt-producing state. But the continuous storms that are keeping much of the nation plastered by ice and snow this winter have made business unusually busy.

“We can’t produce enough to keep up with demand at the moment,” said Lyons Salt president Steve Kadel, who can watch the trucks come and go around the clock from his second-story office window.

Half of the roughly 500,000 tons of salt normally mined at Lyons each year is used for treating roads. But at this time of year, 80 percent of the mined salt — up to 3,600 tons a day — is destined for roads.

“If we had 10 tons a day, they would take it,” said Kadel, who has a decorative, jolly snowman with the phrase “Bring on the Blizzard” hanging in his office lobby.

At the Independent Salt Co. mine in nearby Kanopolis, Steve Olson, vice president for distribution, calls the current demand “the worst in quite a while.”

“We’ve got a good backlog looking at us, and hopefully we’ll be able to get a lot of tonnage delivered before we get hit again,” Olson said.

At Independent Salt, a 50 percent increase in road salt tonnage keeps about 56 employees working two nine-hour shifts seven days a week. Roughly 90 percent of the salt mined in Kanopolis is for roads, Olson said.

“Ice and snow is the harvest season for us like wheat season is for farmers,” Olson said.

During the high-demand period, 46 miners and other Lyons Salt employees have been working two 12-hour weekday shifts and eight- to 10-hour weekend shifts.

The work goes on 1,000 feet below ground in cavernous rooms. Rock salt is blasted from the walls, crushed and sent to the surface in two metal buckets, each carrying five tons. The rock then is sorted by size through a series of screens, and the road salt is sent by conveyor belt to a metal shed that can hold 18,000 tons.

On a recent day, the shed held just 4,000 tons. A noisy front-end loader grabbed large bites from the giant piles, jarring pigeons from the rafters high above, and carried the salt across the shed to the waiting trucks.

Among the waiting drivers was Larry Anderson, of Americus.

“There’s demand for salt everywhere,” Anderson said. “We’ve had places where we dump salt and all they had was on their trucks getting ready to go out.”

Anderson’s latest run was to Blue Springs, Mo., and its 220 miles of roads. The Kansas City suburb typically uses 1,200 tons of salt per winter, but it already has gone through 1,800 tons this season.

“We’re riding the fence and hoping to fall off on the good side,” said Chris Sandie, the city’s assistant public works director.

Ordering road salt is partly a guessing game. Decisions are made each summer, based in part on the previous winters. The relatively mild winters of the past few years left many caught short by this year’s severe storms.

Kadel hopes to have a shed holding 70,000 tons ready next winter to make it quicker and easier to load trucks. Currently, Lyons can handle about 150 trucks a day.

According to Richard L. Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute in Alexandria, Va., the nation used 13.4 million tons of road salt in 2002.