— By Eric Francis

5/22/25

Hartford, VT—The bulk of the water that inundated several streets and parking lots in downtown White River Junction immediately after the skies opened around 6 p.m. Saturday appeared to come down from Fairview Terrace and the section of Route 5 that leads onto North Main Street.

And those waves of water coursing down Route 5 were the result of a culvert jamming just above the rear corner of the former 25,000 Gifts store, says Hartford Department of Public Works Assistant Director of Operations Jeremy Delisle. (See photo essay below.)

Instead of sending water underneath Route 5 along a series of established drainage paths that lead down through the rail yard and to the White River, the clogged culvert suddenly diverted a torrent of water out through the construction site where 25,000 Gifts used to stand, and onto the pavement where there was nothing stopping it from heading downhill.

“What used to be considered the ‘hundred year flood’ has now happened every summer for the past four or five years,” Delisle said Monday as he supervised the cleanup of mud and muck from clogged drains along Gates Street. “The climate’s definitely changed a little bit. You don’t get nice little rain drizzles any more. It’s all constant downpours.”

And with heavy rainstorms becoming more frequent, “It’s not just people next to the White River that have to worry,” Dartmouth College geographer Sarah Kelly notes in the wake of this weekend’s flash flood.

“When culverts fail they change the distribution of who’s affected both upstream and downstream from that culvert,” Kelly, a research scientist with the Dartmouth-affiliated Rural Rivers Program, explains.

Earlier this month, Dartmouth student Kalyn Dawes, an Earth Sciences major from California, gave a senior honors thesis presentation highlighting her research efforts on Hartford’s culvert situation to a packed meeting room at the Hartford Fire Station.

Dawes showed town officials—including the town manager, the fire and police chiefs, and several members of the town road crew—mapping data she’s compiled on how the loss of “road segments” due to culvert failure during a flash flood can turn a two-minute ambulance response into a 45-minute ordeal.

“Road destruction has become almost commonplace in New England the past few summers, (because) we’ve seen a much more dramatic increase in precipitation in New England than anywhere else in the country and this is definitely impacting infrastructure,” Dawes said.

Hartford proved to be a “really great place” to study the culvert issue, which Dawes said she hopes to turn into a model of how to evaluate and prevent risks to similar infrastructure nationwide.  “Roads are kind of the most essential thing for first responder access,” she noted.

Hartford is a “dispersed community” containing about 5,000 buildings laced among the watersheds of both the White and the Ottauquechee rivers, where “there aren’t that many ways to get places,” she explained.

Dawes systematically modeled the consequences of road failures around Hartford, identifying 700 segments of both dirt and pavement that amount to “single-access-point roads.”

Dawes gave the example of Willard Road, which has 14 culverts, half of which she said are poorly maintained. If any of those fail, it would leave 194 houses cut off from immediate emergency services access.

Perhaps even more troubling is the VA Cutoff Road, which runs right in front of Hartford’s combined fire and police station, Dawes suggested.

“A small tributary of the White River weaves along both sides of a road which is really essential to providing an emergency response for 3,000 homes, more than half of Hartford,” Dawes said. “And it has seven poorly maintained culverts.”

Starting last fall, Dr. Kelly brought an initiative called Culvert Crawlers to Hartford. It seeks to link local volunteers with town officials to form a sort of neighborhood watch program for culvert infrastructure.

“We’re looking for community partners to help us do the work,” Kelly said this week, something that residents in Ludlow have already begun doing along the Black River watershed, where a half-dozen volunteers have joined 50 Dartmouth students in recent years performing culvert mapping, observation, and maintenance tasks.

Already about a hundred culverts in Hartford have been mapped into an app that Culvert Crawlers is helping to develop. It allows volunteers to use their phones to track and report the status of their neighborhood infrastructure using an “Adopt a Culvert” model, Kelly said.