After hours of downpour through Sunday into Monday morning, it was a soggy wakeup for residents of Sandisfield, Massachusetts.
“As we came in this morning, first thing we did was we went out and did a check of roads due to the heavy rain that we were getting in the area," said Brad Curry, Department of Public Works Superintendent for the Southern Berkshire community of just under 1,000. “Upon doing our first initial checks, the analysis was that we were experiencing some major flooding in some places. We had a few places where trees had came down out of the forest and out of the woods and blocked streams, which therefore impacted the culvert, which didn't allow the water to go through which then, therefore, flooded certain areas of roads and paved roads.”
The end result of that analysis was bleak.
“Basically, with all this rain that we've had, the ground is saturated, the water has nowhere to go except for running off," Curry told WAMC. "And it's an extreme condition we've not experienced for quite some time.”
With that, Curry and his team got to work.
“Once we got an assessment of most of our roads, we set a grader out to take care of any minor washing and then we sent a dump truck along with the grader to take care in places where it washed out there very deep," he said. "Myself, personally, I was driving a dump truck today, hauling an inch and a half and three-inch dense grade to different spots and locations to fill in some of the wash outs.”
The effort is limited by Sandisfield’s $3.8 million budget and small staff. The highway department budget of just under $900,000 amounts to almost a quarter of the town’s total spending for fiscal year 2024.
“We take care of 96 miles of road," Curry explained. "We have five employees counting myself. So, it's quite taxing on us as far as keeping us busy. We try to prioritize and take the worst roads first and work our way back to the other roads. Sometimes it's kind of hard to choose between which was the worst one because they're all pretty bad sometimes, depending on what it is. As far as affecting the community-wise, it's a lot to ask for the budget that we have set forth for the year.”
While Curry says Sandisfield’s roads are now mostly clear, Tuesday looks to be just as busy.
“We have some roads that are passable, but they still have some washing down the sides, which therefore could make them dangerous at some point," he told WAMC. "We'll be setting up some cones tonight. It’s mostly all dirt roads. As far as paved roads, the biggest thing we had was some gravel washing into the paved roads and driveways, residents’ driveways, and washed into some of the roads. We sent a backhoe out to take care of that also. So tomorrow, the plan is to have the grader out to finish up any of the washing and scouring, and also, to have a few dump trucks haul to those sites that needed any extra materials that's needed at that point.”
Curry, who also serves as the town’s Highway Department Superintendent, says the commonwealth could do more to support communities like Sandisfield when it comes to maintaining the infrastructure most impacted by extreme weather.
“Just like a lot of other things in the Commonwealth, over the years, it's kind of went upside down," he said. "I'm also a member of the Berkshire Highway Association along with the Mass Highway Association, and as we've all looked at things, all of us highway superintendents, we've been lobbying the congressional people to try to redo the Chapter 90 formula to make it fairer to some of the smaller communities that doesn't have the bigger business tax base or the bigger home tax base.”
Despite Sandisfield’s struggles, Curry sympathizes with even smaller Western Mass municipalities faced with divvying up their own limited budgets to handle infrastructure maintenance and weather crisis.
“We have a hard enough time, I can't imagine being like in Worthington or anything like that," Curry told WAMC. "Those guys, I mean, they're a small community also. It makes it tough. You really have to look at how everything goes in your community, and you have to have a plan, you have to have some kind of a sense so you understand where you're going to be and where you're going to be financially, because if not, then basically you’re going to fail at some point.”
