Posted on October 7, 2024
BARRE — Local officials aren’t using the “D-word,” but that doesn’t mean the city’s public works crew hasn’t helped remove hundreds of cubic yards of gravel and sediment from a flood-prone section of the Stevens Branch in recent days.
It has — and you don’t have to visit the mini mountain of still-damp gravel that is growing behind Tarquinio Park on Farwell Street if you’re looking for evidence. Though a rented long reach excavator — one that comes with its own operator — was idle Friday morning, City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro said the equipment has been busy just north of the Berlin Street bridge and its work isn’t done.
“Don’t call it ‘dredging,’” said Storellicastro, who has settled on the phrase “river sedimentation management” when explaining the state-sanctioned exercise that started Monday, is expected to spill into next week, and will hopefully lessen the likelihood the river will spill over its banks at a chronic choke point.
Storellicastro believes it is a distinction with a difference, even while conceding “…’river sedimentation management’ sounds like Orwellian speak.”
“Just call it ‘preventive maintenance,’” he said. “This is a way to do maintenance to prevent unnecessary disasters with a very targeted, precise, surgical approach to a known hazard.”
That hazard was a gravel “island” that had formed just beyond the bridge — one that was overtopped by floodwaters both last July and this one and, very nearly, Storellicastro said, the December in between.
“It’s a problem,” he said of the bridge, which has been a choke point for channel-clogging debris in the summer months and ice jams in the winter.
The “island,” which was likely partly composed of material from washed out roads in upstream communities, like Plainfield and Barre Town, made a bad situation worse and it has now been raked to the rivers edge and is in the process of being scooped up by that super-sized excavator and hauled off one city dump truck at a time.
Storellicastro said the focused attempt to alleviate a known “risk” hasn’t gone unnoticed. The size of the excavator, parked on a thin strip of land between the river and the railroad tracks behind r.k. Miles lumberyard, helped ensure that, as did the parade of city trucks carrying their still-dripping cargo to Farwell Street.
Storellicastro heard about it “in the hockey locker room” and through a number of texts. He said the response — essentially, “Good for you for dredging” — was positive, but required him to channel his inner Orwell.
“This is not ‘dredging,’” he said. “We’re not trying to channelize the river.”
Storellicastro said the excavator wasn’t digging into the river bed, it was removing the gravel and sediment that settled on top of it creating an obstruction just beyond a bridge that is already an obstruction.
“This is a natural way to do it without harming the rest of the (river) ecosystem,” he said.
After consulting with river scientists who visited the site, Storellicastro said the city sought and obtained verbal permission from the state Agency of Natural Resources to proceed and was told it would need to retroactively request and obtain a permit.
Though the city has applied for no-match federal money that could finance the eventual removal of the Berlin Street bridge, as well as other hazard mitigation projects in the city, that project — if funded — could take years. After last December’s close call with flooding, Storellicastro said removing the “island” before winter made sense.
The gravel now drying on Farwell Street will eventually be reused as base material in various city projects.
Rick Dente, whose North Main Street market isn’t far from the Berlin Street bridge, had a different way to describe what Storellicastro is calling “river sedimentation maintenance.”
“It’s a start,” said Dente, whose market and neighboring North Main Street properties have flooded eight times over the years.
“It’s about time they did something,” he added.
If Dente had his way, the city would do considerably more. He wouldn’t rule out dredging, but first he would focus on removing scrap metal, dead trees and other debris in the city’s rivers and brooks.
“You need to attack the (river) capacity, by cleaning them out first,” he said.
Dente said he’d invite area contractors to volunteer a day of equipment and labor to aid with a supervised cleanup effort.
“It’s a door that doesn’t cost you anything to open, and you can always leave it closed,” he said.
