The fact that Montgomery Elementary School had to move classes online during a time of escalating Covid-19 headlines may not seem unusual. But is it news that the switch was spurred by impassable dirt roads this mud season?
That sticky question is up for debate.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m taking it very seriously,” said Sandra Alexander, principal of the 120-pupil school just 10 miles from the Canadian border.
That sentiment is shared in other Vermont communities such as Barre, where local leaders say the muck is some of the worst in memory, and Lincoln, where the road crew theorizes the lack of a January thaw led to a deeper frost that, with freakishly fast-warming weather, is bubbling to the surface.
Gov. Phil Scott, in contrast, isn’t as hot on the issue.
“I’m not being insensitive, but I hear this every single year,” he said at a press conference this week. “I live on a back road, so I experience it on a daily basis. It’s about typical, from my perspective.”
In a state where more than half of all roads are unpaved, mud season is a perennial problem. Geologists say it dates back 13,000 years, when melting glaciers smeared Vermont’s bedrock with a layer of silt and clay.
The resulting spread acts less like a sieve than a sponge. That means when the sun hits most dirt roads in the spring, the melt doesn’t seep down or out but instead sits and stews.
With patience strained by the pandemic, Vermonters are especially stuck on the situation this year.
“Frustration is totally understandable,” Montgomery Selectboard Chair Charlie Hancock wrote on the town’s Facebook page. “There’s no way around this. The situation sucks, and frankly looking at the forecast, it may get worse before it gets better, but we’ll continue to try and triage as quickly as we can.”
Montgomery residents are expressing thanks for road workers steering graders and gravel. They’re less appreciative of tank trucks mucking up efforts as they haul maple sap.
“Our biggest challenge right now is putting more weight on roads which are already coming apart,” Hancock wrote on Facebook. “We’re also somewhat limited in what we can do with the grader or excavator, since there’s only so much we can do pushing mud around.”
Similar quagmires are reported all the way to Vermont’s southern border, where Downtown Brattleboro Alliance Director Stephanie Bonin shared a photo of her own swallowed-up car.
“No sweat,” the caption reads. “It just means spring is springing!”
One might think a municipality could literally just pave over the problem. But Vermont’s 246 cities and towns, each facing an average of 46 miles of unpaved routes, have found asphalt and its maintenance can cost even more than sticking with dirt roads. That’s why many simply urge people to avoid dirt roads and hiking trails until they dry.
“If you buy a house on a dirt road,” Belvidere Town Clerk Cathy Mander-Adams said, “you probably ought to know about what to expect; i.e., potholes and lost exhaust pipes.”
Holland Town Clerk Diane Judd speaks from similar experience and from being the wife of her town’s road foreman.
“Most folks are very understanding,” she said, “that there isn’t much that can be done.”