Eight years of collaboration between Vermont environmental and transportation agencies and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation have helped Massachusetts improve engineering practices to make culverts, bridges and other infrastructure more storm-resistant.
“Vermont had a really good idea that we’ve adjusted to regulatory expectations and best practices here in Massachusetts,” says Roy Shiff, senior water resources engineer and scientist at SLR International Corp. and a consultant to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.
“In 2017, when we started working on bridge and culvert projects, there were no specifications for riverbed restoration around bridges and culverts,” he says. Now, 100 projects use an SLR specification that MassDOT helped develop, leading to a major change in the way projects are managed, he says.
“MassDOT was starting to think about right-sizing sewers, bridges and roads and expanded from there,” Shiff recalls.
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MassDOT crews recently used river management principles to correctly size a stream crossing for a $4.8 million road reconstruction project in New Braintree, Massachusetts, which included replacing two deck bridges and two undersized culverts.
Photo courtesy of MassDOT
Major flooding across New England in 2023 and 2024, including the flood in Leominster, Mass., which dumped 9.5 inches of rain in six hours, has created many river issues and renewed interest in flood mitigation with an interest in innovative infrastructure improvements, Shiff says. Towns, cities, regional commissions, states and federal agencies all have questions about how to become more resilient and protect themselves from flooding, he says.
Rivers and Roads training courses include Level 1, an introductory online course, an introduction to fluvial geomorphology (river process and form); Level 2, a one-day course including a classroom session with fluvial table demonstrations to explain the principles of fluvial geomorphology, fieldwork to learn field assessment techniques and visit relevant projects, and Level 3, a one-day course to support project review and implementation.
The statewide training is sponsored by MassDOT and other partners, including the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the Division of Fish and Wildlife.
In addition to online training, in-person training is available three to four times a year through Massachusetts Baystate Roads University for agencies, cities and towns, consulting engineers or scientists. More than 500 people have participated since the pandemic with 90 to 100 participants a year, Paulson says. “It’s bringing regulatory agencies, engineers, scientists, planners and the local people from the Department of Public Works together in the same room, creating a good baseline for developing resilient projects,” he says.
The course presents up-to-date science and available resources, including GIS data with guidance on how to use it. MassDOT is also preparing to release a PDF field manual in the spring with river science terminology and principles explained for quick reference.
Students participated in a one-day Level 2 course, which includes a classroom session with river table demonstrations on the principles of fluvial geomorphology (river process and form) in Westfield, Massachusetts in 2024.
Photo courtesy of MassDOT
Through the Baystate Roads program, MassDOT aims to empower its partners, including small towns with the scariest resources, to learn how to mitigate or prevent traffic conflicts, Paulson says.
Vermont Department of Conservation river scientist Staci Pomeroy, who led the work with MassDOT on the river and road efforts, says the Vermont-Massachusetts partnership benefits the region “through continued efforts to train road crews, contractors, consultants and others who work on rivers during flood emergencies and in daily efforts to improve the resilience process and maintain a good flood impact on the improvement and resilience process of rivers”.
This partnership between Massachusetts and Vermont environmental and transportation agencies is spurring innovative flood resiliency improvements for Massachusetts road projects and river science-based training.
While it’s impossible to properly size all bridges and culverts in Massachusetts at once, MassDOT is taking steps to update and improve infrastructure resilience based on evolving standards, says MassDOT spokesman John Goggin.
David Paulson, supervisor of MassDOT’s Endangered Species and Wildlife Unit says, “Sculverts and bridges are where we have the greatest opportunity to incorporate resiliency improvements into our road networks.”
MassDOT is upgrading the size of culverts and bridges to adequately handle river and stream flows associated with severe inland precipitation events.
“We are striving to achieve 1.2x the state’s bankful balance sheet [discharge] width [of streams] standard for hydraulic openings,” says Paulson.
The agency also typically provides chafing protection covered by a more natural bedding layer. “Rock shovels and block baffles are sometimes used strategically to divert high flows away from bridge abutments and road embankments,” he says.
In New Braintree, Massachusetts, MassDOT crews used river management principles to correctly size a stream crossing for a $4.8 million road reconstruction project completed in July, Goggin says.
Before construction began in 2023, “undersized culverts were handling water flow with a culvert unable to process flow at least twice during severe precipitation events in recent years,” he says.
Rivers and Roads Level 2 students learned how to measure stream profiles and bank width during fieldwork in Princeton, Massachusetts in 2023.
Courtesy of MassDOT
The project delivered two new deck bridges sized to carry flood flows, as well as fish and wildlife, and was built to Massachusetts River and Stream Crossing standards. In addition to replacing the two bridges and municipally owned culverts, the project restored the stream and riparian habitat and improved fish passage upstream for trout and other cold-water species.
Through MassDOT’s newly established Community Sewer Grant Program, municipalities and tribal governments can apply for funding for a range of sewer resiliency projects.
MassDOT also used river science to inform the design of two failed retaining wall projects, Paulson says. In a project along Rt. 116 in Conway, Massachusetts and another down the road. 9 in Cunningham, Mass., near Springfield, on the West Branch of the Westfield River, where the road and river in close alignment create “valley constraints,” Paulson says. “We were able to reset the retaining wall so that it creates some additional width within the floodplain bank to increase capacity.”
In a narrow stretch of the river with the road on one side, where the water rushes past, the MassDOT team created more flood plains and slowed the water by designing the retaining wall to offset it farther from the river and closer to the road.
