By Richard Czaplinski
Last week I took a little drive to see some of the damage to roads and driveways in The Valley after the cloudbursts that occurred on Tuesday night, August 16. It’s truly impressive how much material can be moved in a very short time – large portions of roads washed out, ditches were now caverns, culverts plugged, bypassed or washed away, and driveways needing repair.
What’s happening? It seems flooding and damage, especially road damage, is a yearly event in localized areas. It wasn’t always this way. In 1973, shortly after I came to Vermont for a job, a statewide flood caused extensive damage. I spent almost the entire summer in southern Vermont as a state rep assessing flood damage. Three years later, in 1976, flooding hit again causing extensive damage in half the state. Then, for a few decades, the flooding pattern changed to local, intense flooding caused by localized cloudbursts until the statewide flooding in 2011 caused by Tropical Storm Irene.
With the new era of climate change upon us, we can expect such flooding, big and small and more often, to continue with all the disruption, emergencies, repairs and mounting costs. So what do we do? We can’t just put things back the way they were. Sooner or later the same amount of water or more will come down the hill and the repairs we made will wash out again – unless we make smarter and more durable repairs to town roads and private roads and drives.
What does this mean? Two things, at least. First, we might look upslope of the damage to see where all the water, technically called stormwater, came from. If it is possible to keep stormwater runoff from concentrating by diverting it, slowing it down and soaking it into the land before it reaches the roadways and drives, much of the problem and damage might be avoided.
The second thing we can do once stormwater reaches the ditches, roads and drives is to slow it down in the ditch before it gets up a head of steam both in volume and speed. This will reduce the energy of the water, making it less powerful in tearing out turf and rock. It also allows settling of sediment and soil so it is not lost downslope and before it enters the river.
The Vermont Better Backroads Manual gives some very good information on how to control stormwater, especially by using rock check dams (control points) and energy dissipaters. Town road crews in The Valley are familiar with and are using this manual as evidenced by these structures appearing when roads are repaired and maintained.
Town road crews can’t do all that needs to be done. Private driveways all exit onto town roads. Water coming down these drives adds to the volume of water concentrating on the roads and can be a significant contribution to flooding, erosion and water quality problems. Unless properly constructed and maintained, these private drives, which, according to information gathered by an ongoing project called Ridge to River (a partnership among all five watershed towns and Friends of the Mad River), constitute half again as many miles as town roads. Some of the methods to control stormwater runoff in the Vermont Better Backroads Manual can be used effectively on private drives, reducing the flooding and erosion problem as well as saving money and time in the long run.
We can’t blame the Mad River and tributaries for flooding. They are just doing their job of taking the water from rain and cloudbursts down from the ridges to the Mad River, to the Winooski River, to Lake Champlain, north via the Richelieu River and St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s just nature and we need to do our best and smartest job to work with nature, trying to keep valuable soil and nutrients on the land and, hopefully, learning to reduce future damages and burdens to sustainable levels.
Czaplinski lives in Warren.
