Windsor, Savoy and Stockbridge win state grants to fix problematic culverts (2024)

WINDSOR— It isn’t every day that a culvert grows up to be a bridge, but it’ll happen sometime within the next several months across a stream on Cheshire Road.

John Denno, Windsor highway superintendent, said he’s pretty excited about the $400,000 grant Windsor landed on Friday to help pay for that new bridge.

Windsor hit the jackpot among the 17 towns that won money in a round of Culvert Replacement Municipal Assistance Grants from the Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration, which focuses on restoring and protecting rivers, wetlands and watersheds in Massachusetts for the benefit of people and the environment. Grants in this program, totaling $2.1 million, were announced Friday.

Two other winners were in Berkshire County: Savoy received $62,000 to collect data, design and engineer the replacement of an undersized culvert on Old Main Road over Phelps Brook. Stockbridge got $51,500 to collect data for a partially crushed and perched culvert on Rattlesnake Mountain Road over Marsh Brook, where flooding has been an issue.

Windsor's $400,000 won’t pay for the entire construction cost of the new bridge, so Denno is counting on the town’s Chapter 90 allotment to pay for the rest.

For now, the road above that old boiler tube culvert is being held up by steel road plates. Failing stone walls are being held up by concrete blocks after the retaining wall and culvert failed and the road washed out in 2022.

At that time, Windsor’s entire highway crew of four spent three days repairing the wall with 2-by-5-foot concrete blocks and one smaller cube of concrete. They also installed road plates to hold up the road. Materials cost several thousand dollars in materials, but he said that was a temporary solution.

As Denno was showing a visitor the culvert, Cheshire Road resident Paul Kozik stopped by in his white pickup truck, asking when the work would be done.

“Hopefully, spring,” Denno told Kozik.

“Next spring. Really,” Kozik said. “I thought you were going to have it done this year.”

“I was hoping. But, no, next spring,” Denno told him.

At a cost of $118,000 paid for with Chapter 90 highway money, Gill Engineering prepared designs for the new bridge. Denno is awaiting final design approval from the state Department of Transportation prior to soliciting bids from contractors.

Culverts, it turns out, aren’t very hospitable to brook trout or the humbly named slimy sculpin. It’s hard to jump up from a stream into a pipe if you’re a fish. And it may not be very comfortable to swim through or fall out of them heading downstream either. Imagine the unanticipated flight at the end of the tunnel.

Apparently, even some mammals find it hard to navigate through culverts. Berkshire Environmental Action Team has been studying culverts for years and their impact on wildlife.

At one stream crossing on Churchill Road in Pittsfield, a Berkshire Environmental Action Team staffer noticed a deer’s rib cage next to the road. After the tube-shaped culvert was replaced with a three-sided box culvert (think square arch), someone caught video of a doe and fawn using it as a crossing, said Jane Winn, executive director at Berkshire Environmental Action Team.

Winn explained why bridges are preferable to culverts when it comes to wildlife.

“Our goal is so that the water will flow over a natural stream bottom and if you were a fish going up there you wouldn’t know that anything changed other than a shadow passed over you as you went up,” Winn said.

And then there’s climate change.

With heavier rains and more flooding today than in the past, culverts tend to clog with storm debris, get damaged or just plain fail, Winn said. Bridges, with their wider openings, can tolerate more water and more debris.

On Friday, DER also awarded the Housatonic Valley Association $248,000 on behalf of Berkshires Clean, Cold, Connected Partnership, a consortium of environmental groups that work to protect the Hoosic, Housatonic and Farmington river watersheds. It was one of three partnerships across the state to win funding.

Timothy Abbott, conservation director of Housatonic Valley Association, said the grant provides a boost to the work of the partnership.

“It will allow us and our partners and communities in the Berkshires to accomplish two really important things,” Abbott said. “First, to understand which bridges and culverts that pass under the roadways in our communities need to be upgraded in response to a change in climate and the kinds of increased waterflow that we can expect. And second, which of these can also be applied to allow wildlife to move freely, both within the streams and alongside them.”