A tube of corrugated metal running under a road might not look like much. But when the rain comes, these structures can mean the difference between a road that survives and one that washes out.
Vermont has over 100,000 culverts doing the quiet daily work of protecting a vast network of state and town roads, including many gravel and dirt byways. Small towns in particular can struggle to keep an eye on all of them. And as climate change intensifies rainfall, Vermont’s roads are increasingly vulnerable.
Clogged culverts can cause road damage during storms, cutting off communities from services and racking up costly bills for towns with already tight budgets.
That’s where the Culvert Crawlers come in. The project mobilizes community members to monitor the state’s culverts, equipping overstretched local road crews with information to help prioritize maintenance.
“I think everybody needs to remember that they can be part of the recovery,” said Margo Caulfield, who helped organize the effort.
“We’re doing everything we can, because it’s going to happen again.”
In communities still reeling from flooding’s effects and beholden to federal, state and local funding decisions, organizers said community-led projects can give people tangible ways to work toward a more resilient future.
The effort was born in the aftermath of the 2023 flood. Kelly Stettner, who lives in Springfield, Vt., was coordinating volunteers to help people muck out their homes in hard-hit Ludlow, Vt., which sits upstream of Springfield on the Black River. Stettner has coordinated river cleanups in the area for over 25 years.
In the aftermath of the flood, she turned her organizing chops to flood recovery.
“There was a feeling of shell shock in a lot of folks,” she said.
Stettner and Caulfield, a longtime Cavendish, Vt., organizer who helped coordinate emergency shelter after the floods, started talking about what steps they could take to make their community fare better in the future.
“Margo kept saying, ‘You know, Kel, we’re doing all this flood mud response. We’re taking this flood mud. Where’s it coming from?’” Stettner recalled.
As they looked upstream for contributing factors in flood damage — as well as ways to make a difference — their attention turned to culverts. When culverts fail, water runs over roads rather than under them, causing erosion, costly damage, and sediment downstream.
Like many other communities, Cavendish, where Caulfield lives, has hundreds of culverts — over 700, according to Dartmouth researcher Charis Boke, who has been a partner on the project.
Boke, who is trained as an anthropologist and was raised in the Black River area, met Stettner while working on mutual aid efforts after the floods.
That led to a convening at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Ludlow in the spring of 2024. Boke and fellow Dartmouth researcher Sarah Kelly asked Stettner how they might help with local resilience.
“I thought for a minute, I got Margo’s voice in the back of my head, and I said, ‘You guys ever thought about culverts?'” Stettner recalled.
From there, the idea has blossomed, with the group enlisting Dartmouth students to develop a platform for community members to record the condition of local culverts. Culvert crawlers don bright vests and tromp through roadside ditches, some of which are dense with vegetation, to peer inside culverts and check for blockages. They also record the condition of the road and look for warning signs that can tip off road crews to the need for attention to a culvert. Some volunteers also help clear minor blockages.
The data collected is incorporated into a map that local highway departments can use to identify which culverts most need maintenance. The team wants communities around the state to adopt the tool and use it in collaboration with their own towns.
“I mean, I’m Wilma Flintstone. If I can use it, anybody can use it,” Stettner said.
Stettner and other organizers hope that Culvert Crawlers will complement state data by making it easy for community members to contribute to more frequent monitoring.
Cavendish was the early test site for the program, and Town Manager Rick Chambers said it’s been a huge help for the town’s highway department.
“As most municipalities, we don’t have the workforce and the time to literally walk the roads and check for every culvert,” Chambers said. “You tend to be more on the maintenance when you see one backed up.”
“Having that extra set of eyes helps,” he added. “Any time you can eliminate a problem before it happens by using every resource you can, is a good idea.”
Monitoring and maintenance isn’t always enough, though. Many of the state’s culverts are too small to handle the region’s intensifying rains, according to Ned Swanberg, who works on flood hazard mapping for the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Replacing culverts with bigger versions is a costly statewide effort.
“With, you know, increasing intense rains, it’s very easy for a town to end up with considerable damage,” Swanberg said.
The Culvert Crawlers program brings “community volunteers and community eyes to the transportation system in town, and all these vulnerable places where roads get washed out,” Swanberg said.
Caulfield and Stettner haven’t limited their efforts to culverts. Caulfield has helped equip her community with go-bags for future disasters, and both are members of their region’s long-term recovery group. Caulfield said that despite the flooding, she’s not planning to go anywhere.
“People always ask me why you want to live in a godforsaken place that floods like this,” Caulfield said.
“No matter where you go, you’re going to be dealing with climate change. Better to stay where you are, with the people you know and love, where you know you can deal with it.”
This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.