German Flats Road in Fayston will be closed for the replacement of a Lockwood Brook culvert for 30 days between August 14 and September 14.
Those dates may be adjusted following a preconstruction meeting that was underway as The Valley Reporter went to press on July 26. The road will be closed from Manlin Road to Slide Brook Road. Signs announcing the closure went up this week. Both lanes of the road will be fully closed during the project.
The $460,453 project was initiated several years ago by Corrie Miller, former executive director of Friends of the Mad River. Miller left the organization last fall and Friends of the Winooski was asked to take over management of the project because it was time sensitive and Friends of the Mad River would be in transition to a new leader.
Michele Braun, executive director of Friends of the Winooski, said Miller worked on the project for five years, working with the forest service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
“This is a project that improves aquatic organism passage. It reconnects the stream. A really cool piece of this is that the headwaters are in the national forest and those streams are protected and forested. That’s important because brook trout only tolerate a small range of temperatures and they’ll be able to swim upstream to the colder water,” Braun said.
The current culvert is set above the streambed instead of being set at grade so fish, turtle, salamanders, amphibians etc., would have to jump up, Braun explained. Further, there is a wide, deep area on the downstream side that the stream has carved out because it falls from the elevated outlet.
“While small, naturally occurring pools in streams are good for trout, a plunge pool like this one is not a natural part of a healthy stream of this size,” she added.
The project is being funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Lake Champlain Basin Program, and the U.S. Forest Service. The town share is $7,500.
Fayston Select Board chair Jared Cadwell informed members of the Mad River Valley Planning District Steering Committee about the closure at that board’s July 20 meeting. At that meeting Margo Wade, Sugarbush’s representative to the steering committee, asked how the road closure would work for school buses. Cadwell said that this week’s preconstruction meeting would cover that as well as alternate routes and specific start and end dates.
This road closure comes on the heels of the East Warren Road being closed for four weeks for a culvert replacement from July 10-August 10.
