(Host) State transportation officials say they are making significant progress repairing roads and bridges throughout Vermont that were damaged by Tropical Storm Irene.
But, as VPR’s Bob Kinzel reports, some of the repairs are temporary and a permanent solution will have to wait until at least the spring.
(Kinzel) A huge grader is traveling up and down a steep hill on Route 14 in East Montpelier repairing a key section of the road that has fallen into a nearby river.
In order to rebuild the hillside, construction crews have brought in more than 20 million pounds of large rocks. George McCool is in charge of this project.
(McCool) "We had a major washout from the floods back in April and May. We fixed them once but then when the hurricane came through it made it twice as bad. It went all the way down to the river and as you can see it’s a good 70 [or] 80 feet down there."
(Kinzel) And McCool says repairing the road got more complicated as crews dug into the collapsed hill side.
(McCool) "And when we took the trees off the bank we found two more slides that we couldn’t see because the trees were covering it all up. It started undermining the road so we took the road out at the same time. We’re going to replace it and do it all right the first time, and so hopefully we never have to come back."
(Kinzel) Sue Minter is Vermont’s Deputy Transportation Secretary. She says the state’s first priority after Irene was making the road system passable and sometimes that meant temporary repairs.
(Minter) "We put these 500 miles worth of affected roads back into action so that we could restore mobility throughout Vermont. We’ve done that but in many cases we’ve had to do very emergency repairs which are in many cases temporary in nature. They’ve been put together quickly even in this two months of roads that would normally take years of design and permitting."
(Kinzel) And Minter says it will probably take a number of years to permanently repair all the damaged roads and bridges.
(Minter) "This is something that we just fix and put in place and go on. It’s something we need evaluating it and in some cases we may have to re-do it in a more significant way. I can’t speak to what it might look like but we are prepared for fixes taking many years."
(Kinzel) Minter is asking Vermonters to report any new damage to their roads to their local district transportation office.
For VPR News, I’m Bob Kinzel in Montpelier.