100-year storms through the eye of a culvert

Region’s drainage losing the battle against climate change

By Zachary Matson

After storms tore through his hometown overnight July 10, dropping 5 inches of rain in a few hours, Keven Severance, Westport’s highway superintendent, and employee Jason Keech tallied all the places you couldn’t drive. 

Angier Hill Road heading north to Whallonsburg, Merriam Forge Road along the Boquet River. Mountain Spring Road near the town’s highland water source. Morrison Road. Taylor Road. Halds Road. Old Arsenal Road. Dudley Road. And Washington Street. 

“That’s most of our roads,” Keech said.  

“We were out of ‘Road Closed’ signs and orange cones,” Severance said.

A park-wide issue

Westport’s workload is indicative of the kind of triage and planning happening through the Adirondack Park to respond to storm damage. 

In the town, parts of state and county roads were also closed from flooding as water washed over low spots, dislodged culverts and, in some places, turned entire roads upside down leaving craters behind.

Severance had left a roadway off his list of damages: Ledge Hill Road. It is a longstanding problem spot because of an undermatched, aging culvert on Hoisington Brook. That’s where during the July storms water backed up and pooled over the pavement as the fast current ripped its own path.

On an August afternoon seven weeks after the disaster, fixing Ledge Hill, at least temporarily, was top of the agenda. Westport highway workers loaded rock and fill and hauled the material to Ledge Hill, where a colleague rebuilt a roadbed across an exposed culvert. 

State Department of Transportation workers helped the town estimate damages of over $4 million. Westport’s five-person highway department has been chipping away at repairs, about 80% of their work through the summer.

The largest projects have to wait for funding and more engineering and design. Some road sections will sit closed until then. 

The storms that hit Westport wreaked more damage in 12 hours than the town’s budget sets aside for an entire year.

The weeks of recovery and rebuilding displaced the kind of preventative and maintenance work meant to limit the impacts of future storms. A similar storm swept across the central Adirondacks exactly one year earlier. 

As the storms stack up, town leaders juggle complex and unpredictable state and federal storm recovery programs, and understaffed highway departments patch roads, replace culverts and repair drainage ditches. The tightrope sways with each storm.

Some local help 

“We are dealing with the repercussions of these storms,” said Caitlin Stewart, executive director of the Hamilton County Soil and Water Conservation District. Soil and water conservation districts play an important role monitoring and minimizing roadside erosion and other overlooked sources of flood risk.

They also seed roadsides with grasses, coordinate funding opportunities and connect resources across counties and watersheds.  

“Our energy, our time is devoted to fixing the immediate problems in the wake of an event. Where is our time to get ahead of it?” Stewart asked. 

State agencies and nonprofits are working to assist communities with immediate storm recovery, while also identifying flood-prone areas and developing ways to mitigate future flooding.

Money from federal infrastructure investments and New York’s $4.2 billion environmental bond act have only just started to flow, and advocates are mobilizing to study watersheds and prioritize projects.

The need to upsize culverts and bridges to gird for growing storms is vast, experts say, and could easily consume available funds. The projects aren’t cheap: In Lewis replacing a pair of four-foot culverts with a 19-foot culvert cost more than $300,000. 

But the costs of floods can be beyond dollars if someone needs urgent medical help. When local highway crews first respond to storms, they prioritize reconnecting routes for emergency vehicles. The difference between a five-minute ambulance drive and a 20-minute detour can be all the difference in the world to someone injured or ailing.  

Culverts are everywhere 

Culverts—the ubiquitous tubes, metal arches and concrete boxes that, most days, channel water quietly under a road or trail—serve as a crucial lynchpin in the region’s infrastructure. Many are not up to the task. 

Sometimes installed generations ago, many culverts are undersized and misaligned. Built to withstand five-year floods, they are facing 100-year storms in consecutive years — one in July 2023 that pummeled the Long Lake and Newcomb area, another this July that pounded the Champlain watershed region.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) inventoried thousands of culverts within the park, scoring their replacement need through a mix of flood prevention and fish passage benefits. 

TNC analyzed about 80% of stream crossings in New York’s portion of the Lake Champlain basin and found about 50% are barriers to aquatic life and around 90% are undersized for the projected coming storms. Thousands of culverts and small bridges pervade the landscape.

“Prioritization becomes really important,” said Josh LaFountain, a freshwater specialist with TNC. “We are starting to think through how to tackle this.”

A coordinated effort

A culvert on Roscoe Road in Lewis for years proved to be too small to accommodate Phelps Brook during even moderate flows, requiring the attention of Lewis highway crews a few times a year. Though delayed by July and August storms, TNC, with funding from the Lake Champlain Basin Program and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, coordinated replacing the culvert with a bigger one able to handle 100-year floods with room to spare. The new aluminum arch culvert is held up by three-foot concrete walls resting on six-foot-wide footers. Its open bottom mimics the natural streambed, and its modern design will reconnect seven miles of brook trout habitat. 

Corrie Miller, aquatic organism passage coordinator with the Lake Champlain Basin Program, was hired after the program received funding from the bipartisan U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.

The federal money will bolster five years of grants to support culvert and bridge upgrades and dam removal in Champlain watersheds.

Miller, LaFountain and other stakeholders across the region are organizing efforts to inventory problem spots in the Adirondacks. They have created a running list of priority projects. Government scientists, nonprofit conservationists and local leaders have added over 200 projects across the park to the list–many involve replacing culverts.

Big floods, small culverts

Think about squeezing a garden hose, how the water sprays faster and further. Something similar happens when high water flows are constricted by undersized culverts. Water velocity increases and, storm after storm, forms a deep scour pool at the culvert’s outlet. The scouring can also develop a slight drop from the culvert to the stream, in some places an insurmountable barrier to fish. 

Dave Minkoff, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service working in the Adirondacks, said projects like the one on Lewis’ Roscoe Road are critical to strengthen resilience to climate change.

As water temperatures warm, brook trout and other fish need access to cooler water. Now, countless barriers prevent their movement, but each upgraded culvert can expand migration and survival. 

“The water temperatures are cold enough and the headwaters are high enough that brook trout are expected to persist,” Minkoff said of Phelps Brook. “It’s a situation where the local ecosystem and local population both benefit.” 

Minkoff noted studies have found that at each major barrier in a river system, a fish population can drop 50%. “If you limit where a fish can go, it limits the fish’s ability to thrive,” he said. 

Since culverts and other barriers can work collectively to exacerbate flooding or limit access to habitat, the fledgling coalition of culvert busters is looking at broader sections of stream. Sometimes you need multiple projects to realize the desired benefits. 

“That’s not uncommon,” Miller said.  

Planning and consultants

Steele Creek, a river in Herkimer County, flows north out of Central New York’s rolling terrain and plunges into the Mohawk River in the village of Ilion. For decades it has flooded large sections of the village.

Ilion Mayor John Stephen served as deputy mayor from 2006 to 2010 and was elected to his first tenure as mayor in 2010, helping to manage a series of flood events in those years. During floods in 2013, Stephen said he hardly stepped foot in his house for five days. After a stint as a county legislator, he was elected to a new term as mayor in 2022. 

When he returned to office, Steele Creek no longer flooded the village. 

“In 2006 I stood in front of the library in chest deep water and watched people go by in their canoes in the middle of the village,” Stephen said. “This year I didn’t even have to worry about anything coming from the crick.”

It all started with a plan. 

Environmental engineers with New Paltz- based SLR Consulting, who are conducting a series of state-funded flood studies around the state, recommended a litany of ways to reduce flooding in Ilion. 

The project, which took about a decade from planning to completion, included the removal of a dam and the sediment that had accumulated behind it, property buyouts and demolition of flood-prone homes along the creek, widening of the stream channel, removal of roads, expansion of floodplain, replacement of an undersized bridge, relocation of utilities and construction of a sewer pump station. 

Studying solutions

Those same engineers this summer completed a study of the Salmon River in Franklin County, recommending ways to reduce flood risk in Malone, Fort Covington, Westville and Bombay. They also initiated a pair of studies on the Ausable and Boquet rivers, which could be completed by next summer. 

The studies identify the most flood-prone areas on the river and suggest ways to reduce flooding in those areas through a series of recommendations, including culvert and bridge replacement, the identification of properties that should be relocated or demolished and areas to reclaim as floodplains.

“There is not a snap solution to these problems,” said Mark Carabetta, SLR’s manager of climate resilience planning.

Carabetta and his team conduct detailed hydraulic analysis of the river systems they study as part of the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Resilient New York program. They meet with local watershed groups, town leaders and others with intimate knowledge of a river’s proclivities. The people who have seen a river up close understand it best.  

“For better or worse most people have had the opportunity to see the real deal,” said Matt Trueheart, an SLR engineer. “It does help people to understand that risk, unfortunately they have to see it firsthand.”

Resilient replacements

After damaging storms, communities will often want to replace roads and bridges as they were before and move on as soon as possible. But experts see storm recovery as an important opportunity to strengthen resiliency to the next storms by upgrading the infrastructure. 

“It can be harder to say let’s do things differently,” said Mieke Scherpbier, an SLR engineer. “Communities want to put an event behind them.”

The SLR engineers made another simple recommendation: When a bridge or culvert is up for regular maintenance, prepare it for a future of more frequent and more severe flood events. 

“Now that we know better, let’s do better,” Scherpbier said. 

State officials are using the flood studies to direct funding from the $4.2 billion state environmental bond act of 2022. 

Suzanna Randall, DEC chief resiliency officer and head of the bond act’s implementation, said officials were creating a bond act funding category that would support projects recommended in the flood studies.

Initial investments from the bond act bolstered existing programs through grants to upgrade wastewater and drinking water infrastructure and funding to repair dams and replace culverts. Randall said they are starting to roll out more new programs. 

“The flood studies are a roadmap,” Randall said. “When communities are hit by a storm and making decisions of how to rebuild they have something to look to.”

Randall acknowledged the expansive need to strengthen infrastructure in the face of climate change, noting that more than $4 billion doesn’t sound so big when considering statewide demands. “The needs are the ocean, and we are a drop in the ocean,” she said. 

State officials hope the flood plans will help communities start preparing for the future.

“We recognize that climate change is not going away, communities are going to continue to be exposed to extreme events, and we want to try and get ahead of it,” said Tom Snow, DEC watershed coordinator. 

‘The right thing in place’

While touring storm damage in Westport, Severance spotted an Essex County Soil and Water District truck.

As one worker drove, Daniel Berheide, senior technician with the district, sprayed an aqua mix along the roadside, hydroseeding. 

When it grows, the grass mix helps minimize bank erosion, stabilizing ditches and areas around culverts. After highway crews repair an area damaged in a storm, the blue spray is not far behind. 

“This year we have been flat out,” Berheide said. “We’ll be recovering for years. We’ll be playing catch up until the next event.”

Severance and Berheide were near a spot called Tea Kettle Bridge, where crews installed a bigger culvert in 2019. The bridge area made it through the recent storms fine. 

“It shows that if you put the right thing in place, it fairs a lot better,” Berheide said.