The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded $3 million to the North Country Council and The Nature Conservancy in New Hampshire to advance transportation resilience and storm readiness across northern parts of the state.
Roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in the North Country have faced severe damage in recent years from extreme storms and flooding events. The damage in Carroll County from storms this past June prompted Gov. Kelly Ayotte to request a federal disaster declaration to help fund recovery costs.
But this new grant will help towns in Northern New Hampshire get ahead of the storms by preparing infrastructure for major flooding events.
This planning grant is targeting road stream crossings, which is where streams pass beneath a road through either a bridge or culverts and pipes. When rainstorms flood the streams, pipes that are too small for the crossing will be overwhelmed. Floodwater then goes up and around the pipes, which floods the roadways and erodes the ground beneath, leading to road washouts.
What the North Country Council and The Nature Conservancy plan to do with this funding is to identify 10 to 15 road stream crossings in the North Country for future resiliency construction projects and get these projects through the initial planning stages, said Alaina Chormann, the climate adaptation program manager for The Nature Conservancy in New Hampshire.
“What we see as the gold standard for climate resilience these days is designing the crossing to be wide enough across the stream to accommodate a 100 year storm event,” Chormann said. These are the “mega storms” that statistically should only occur in size and magnitude once every hundred years.
Climate change has increased the amount of intense rain and snow in the Northeast, which has heightened the risk of flooding. The National Climate Assessment found extreme precipitation events have increased by about 60% in the region since the 1950s.
The crossings also must be designed to be wildlife and ecosystem friendly. Chormann said they should be able to carry both fish and terrestrial wildlife like moose and bears underneath the road. This should also improve public safety and prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions, in theory, allowing large animals to avoid walking over roadways.
Identifying the best crossings to invest in before major flooding happens is just the first step, said Chormann.
“And that’s not an easy step, especially for small local communities to do that in the first place because they’re stuck in that cycle of reacting post-disaster,” she said. “They never really get to the proactive part.”
The next step is to conduct several types of geotechnical and hydrogeological engineering studies and secure environmental permits, which can be expensive and time-consuming.
“That’s why we’re trying to bring some more external resources to help these communities get through that process,” Chormann said.
Once these permits and engineering studies come through, the project can develop a rough sketch of their design and finish the preliminary engineering stage.
From there, projects would require another stage of final design engineering before bringing a construction crew to implement the project.
“It’s a very complicated process, and it can take years, really,” said Chormann. She explained that she has seen some road stream crossing projects in New Hampshire reach preliminary designs in 2018 and are only just starting construction nearly ten years later. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen in this case, but that is the reality of working in the transportation sector.”
Once communities can get through the initial planning, these road stream crossing projects will be well-positioned to receive future local, state, and federal funding opportunities to finish up engineering designs and get construction crews out making these flood-resiliency improvements.
Chormann said that the North Country Council has heard from their communities that there is a strong need for investment in their infrastructure, but small communities of just hundreds of people face funding issues when it comes to large projects.
“They have to decide between fixing this culvert or buying a new fire truck for their town,” she said.
