St. Albans, Vermont is moving to replace a culvert on Elizabeth Street, a small but telling sign of how urgently communities across the state are racing to upgrade stormwater systems that were never built for today's storms.
The Town of St. Albans, a Franklin County community of about 6,000 residents in northwestern Vermont, is seeking a contractor for the project. The specific budget and timeline have not been publicly disclosed, but the listing through Vermont's Department of Economic Development suggests state or federal funding is involved, a common arrangement since the July 2023 floods triggered a wave of disaster recovery money flowing to local infrastructure.
That flood event was a turning point. Montpelier and dozens of other Vermont communities suffered catastrophic damage when undersized culverts became chokepoints, sending water over roads and into homes and businesses. The damage statewide topped $2 billion. Since then, Vermont has accelerated efforts to inventory and replace culverts that are decades old and undersized for the heavier rainfall now arriving with greater frequency. Federal dollars from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and FEMA hazard mitigation programs have helped, but the need far outruns the pace of repairs.
Source: NationGraph.
For St. Albans, the stakes go beyond flood control. The town sits in the Lake Champlain watershed, where municipalities are under a federal mandate to reduce phosphorus runoff into the lake. Faulty or undersized culverts channel nutrient-laden stormwater directly into streams and eventually into Champlain, contributing to the algae blooms that have plagued St. Albans Bay and other parts of the lake for years. A culvert upgrade here serves double duty: keeping streets passable during storms and keeping pollution out of the water.
Vermont has thousands of culverts that were installed 40 to 60 years ago and are now deteriorating or too small for current conditions. The state and VTrans have been working through a prioritized replacement list for years, but local projects like this one on Elizabeth Street are where that work finally meets the ground.
Contractor selection is underway now, with the town working through the Vermont Business Registry procurement process.
