Not sure why the embed failed? It is worth a watch particularly if you never made the pilgrimage -
http://t.co/BgJCx1F Don – It's still too soon to be able to answer your questions, things have now moved on past triage, repairs of roads is ongoing. Damaged bridges are being fast-tracked to return them to service, all the same, that begins with, quantifying what's broke and how much to patch it, or fix it...
Tripping to damaged and lost bridges for stabilization's and assessments drove home how severe the devastation is, as those roads with either, passed lost homes or villages – 125+ Homes lost, maybe 600+ left unlivable, still don't have a real number for bridges.
And I don't see the utility as secondary, superior service life says otherwise. IMO tourism is secondary.
Ken – Unlike Bartonsville, as you guessed, there is no talk of replicating Blenheim. That might be because so much more was lost there, and there are more demanding things to wonder after. Might be because, it is truly irreplaceable.
David – The emergency situation and the time crunch it demands, suggests it would be hard to coordinate this as a teaching exercise. At the same time, there will be experience to be found as result of all this, which is the only upside I see to any of it.
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1285 bridges were lost to Vermont's '27 Flood, ironically, more would have been lost with this one, had spotty happenstance not taken so many then.
Days of blue sky followed the storm, hard rain the last two, there's a flood watch in southern Vermont just now. A good rain, but I don't expect any streams to spill their banks. Hope'n it's maybe a good thing, and it will help settle erosion. Every lost bridge I visited, washed away, not because it floated off its abutments, but because one of its abutments went out from under it. That including Bartonsville. (itself a replacement for a bridge lost to flooding) I dropped into unseen undermined holes at bridges only damaged. Other bridges had entire approaches washed away. Again if these rains expose sinkholes and erosion settles before repair begins, that can only be a good thing – The engineering community looks at every natural disaster for lessons learned. The soil side of engineering might be the real lesson to be learned from this event. ie - How do we keep the fines from being washed away from behind dry laid walls – Is it possible to retrofit anything without doing more harm than good? Is new dry-laid an option backed with layers of geotextiles and / or chipped tires – To my mind, the proven service life they've demonstrated demands we ask?
