Crews build back riverside roads, but for how long?

According to Vermont Transportation Agency engineer Jason Cloutier, the crews had been able to get one lane open the previous night, but the state asked to keep it closed one more day. Cloutier sympathized with the folks living in the eastern part of Hardwick who, cut off from parts had to be rerouted along several miles of dirt road up and over Hopkins Hill.

“We were trying to push through so the local community could go get a gallon of milk, or go to work or something,” Cloutier said.

It has since been re-opened, even as crews work to improve upon its design.

Cloutier speaks with an engineer’s casual intellect that causes a layperson to nod politely as he rattles off facts related to mathematical equations and angles and weight distribution loads, and pulls out his small, orange-covered engineer’s notebook to show his hand-drawn design that Sicard is following. Essentially, he said, the crews will push back against the river using math — hard triangles versus natural curves.

Cloutier said the river met Route 15 at enough of an angle that, before rounding the bend as normal, it essentially overshot its own corner and made it wider. He thinks the road can be built back stronger to beat back the river, but questions how much longer humans, despite their advanced math degrees, can continue to beat back nature.

A half mile closer to town, about one third of the Inn by the River had been swept into the river. Freda Hollyer, who has owned the inn for the past half dozen years, told Vermont Public Thursday that the river had taken out the original motel back in the 1970s, and they won’t rebuild there again.

“We really never should have built our highways alongside rivers,” Cloutier said. “But the rivers were the original highways.”