This commentary is by Suzanne Lupien of Vershire, who calls herself a dirty farmer and essayist.
Perhaps you have noticed in your community massive ditches being carved out along any and all roads with a noticeable gradient, soils carted off and the ditches filled with load after load of stone.
This program, known as the Vermont Department of Transportation’s Storm Water Runoff Program, has been billed from the start as a major step in protecting our roads from climate change. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It was hatched at the state level by top road honchos, Agency of Natural Resources, and the Legislature as a way to get the EPA off Vermont’s back and fund the cleanup of Lake Champlain. Apparently, it came down to creating this program, requiring all Vermont towns to sign up, and raking in permitting fees with which to clean up the lake.
Unless I missed something, the linkage of this brainchild was never made public, and this political construct was quietly initiated. Town backhoes, excavators and dump trucks have been humming ever since, “improving” our roads.
Never mind that career officials, top roadmen with lifetimes of experience, fought the plan from the get-go, pointing out that this was an underhanded, untested road theory with nothing going for it except making peace with EPA. And getting this questionable plan adopted by all Vermont towns — squeaking it past the land people, the farmers and the roadmen — would be difficult. So we’ve gone along with few obvious detractors, and for the last few years our rural landscape and its inhabitants have borne the brunt of vast environmental damage, and loss of incalculable volumes of soil, vegetation and aquatic life.
Try as I have, and do, to unravel the murky pretext, multiple unreturned phone calls to the Department of Transportation and the Agency of Natural Resources, mum is the word. Virtually everyone involved is in lockstep, marching ominously ahead with the endless ditching and stoning, disrupting settled, stable verges, stirring things up so they can wash away in the rain.
I am aggrieved at the lack of honesty from state government and by the wholesale neglect of customary practices of road maintenance, largely displaced by this program. Getting no help from any state officials to answer my questions, I have resorted, in the intervening years, to conduct my own informal survey of roadmen and town officials, all of whom condemn this program, its wastefulness of money, material and labor, and its glaring ignorance of the ensuing damage as the consequence.
I have phoned town managers here and there, questioning them about routine maintenance in their towns, asking if the spring job of cleaning out culverts was still accomplished. They told me that road crews are not inclined to bend over with shovels in their hands, and that no, culverts were not routinely cleaned. A clogged culvert is trouble, and engineering-increased waterflow via a bigger ditch will blow out the culvert sooner or later and wreck the road.
The consensus of all the folks I spoke with is that the old maintenance regimen worked just fine, give or take an extraordinary flood, in which case nothing works, and the gist of it is this:
When the posting of the back roads is over in the spring, the culverts are cleaned. All debris is lifted from the ditches, and the roads are graded by skilled grader operators running the low end of the blade in the ditch, defining the ditch depth and establishing the dome of the road at the same time.
When the job is complete, the dome in the center of the travel portion of the road will cause a slow dispersal of rainwater and runoff. The ditch in most cases is largely undisturbed, the vegetation growing there helping very much to hold the soil, and the frogs and everybody else that lives in the ditch can survive, helping to keep our coons, skunks, owls and minks from starving.
This work may occupy the road crew for a month or more, then it’s on to roadside mowing (one swath is enough, guys), then on to regular summer work as required by state law. Later in the fall, the grader returns to flatten the crown for winter snowplowing and vehicular safety.
Where I live, these necessary rituals are not adhered to, and ditching is king. The roads are no longer crowned, ditches are deep and steep and dangerous, and washouts occur regularly. There are places where two cars can barely pass and winter navigation is treacherous, with cars slipping into the maws of the damned ditches.
Yes, we all know it rains harder now. That’s a sad fact. But the saddest fact is that the best road craftsmanship has given way to this impractical initiative, a tragedy for our rural roads, our wildlife, our town budgets, and spells the end of the respectful and watchful approach of the previous time.
Let’s teach our road crews to operate the grader properly, bend over with a shovel as necessary, slow the runoff with crowns rather than intensify it with canals, and just do what we used to do. It works.
