I've got a stack of grant proposals in process lying around my work space, all with near-term deadlines. Developing and writing a grant proposal is as stressful as planning a wedding can be. An outdoor wedding. With parking in a field that's prone to wet. One major difference has to do with frequency. Most marriages last at least eight years (says the Web). Most grants are on annual or shorter cycles.
One of the proposals in the stack would fund work on the Roaring Branch in Bennington, to reduce its instability in high water. (The project is under design right now, thanks to a different grant.) The project team will have to prove the costs of implementing the design will be outweighed by the benefits, both public and private. And so I've been researching just how much has been spent in response to floods on the Roaring Branch. The town's annual reports have been very helpful.
And interesting in ways I didn't expect.
The 1898 report portrays a town seemingly overrun by dogs, and a Select Board on the hook for damage done by them. Among those reimbursed for dog damage were Ed Kingsley, for 13 sheep killed and 6 wounded; Daniel Potter for one ram; and R.O. Gore for one colt, one calf, one duck, and three hens.
A much larger expense was the flood of Oct. 5 in that year, on which the Select Board spent $28,000. (That's anywhere from $700,000 to $21,364,000 in 2007 dollars, depending on the method of calculation.)
The sum included $18.20 to pay W.P. Montgomery to sharpen 130 picks and 34 bars used, in the hands of men and perhaps women, to move material transported by the Roaring Branch in flood.
Dog damage was still an issue in the annual report of 1940. Despite the services of a dog constable (who was paid $228.25), the town still spent $332 to recompense sheep owners for losses due to dogs, and chicken and duck owners $25.15.
By far the largest expenditures in the year ending February 1940, however, were in response to the flood of Sept. 21, 1938. Bennington spent $32,967.31 on excavating the Roaring Branch and building the Branch Street flood wall, and this was on top of $50,000 spent in fiscal year 1939. (The total ranges from $1,244,505 to 10 times that in 2007 dollars.)
According to Republic of Shade, New England and the American Elm, by Thomas J. Campanella, Dutch elm disease reached Vermont in 1945. But in the Bennington annual report, 1951, town manager Paul H. Hermann reports that "through a comprehensive sanitation and spraying program our beautiful elm trees remained green throughout the summer as compared to previous years."
He doesn't say so, but the program probably used the chemical DDT to kill the elm bark beetle, one of the vectors of the disease. (Some people think the 1938 hurricane and the downed elms it left behind hastened the spread of the elm bark beetle.) Communities all across the eastern U.S. routinely sprayed this "toxic mist," as Campanella calls it, and caused, as we now know, a collapse in wild bird populations. It's a discordant image, isn't it — green-graceful elms, dead robins. DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972.
That report also notes the town spent $80,574.53 on one flood in 1949, $56,203.90 on two floods in 1950, and $26,257.70 on the preceding year's floods in 1951, and that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was scheduled to spend $36,000 on wall reconstruction upstream of the Brooklyn Bridge that year.
Then Roaring Branch has indeed been "a permanent annual problem and expense," as one report notes. If successful, our project team's grant proposals will address this situation, using river science tools much more powerful than picks and rock bars.
But here in deadline season, a little pick and rock bar work would feel a lot less stressful than writing grant proposals.
Shelly Stiles is the district manager for the Bennington County Conservation District, whose mission is promoting rural livelihoods and protecting natural resources in Southwestern Vermont. Web site at www.bccdvt.org.
This column appeared in the Bennington Banner in October 2008, as one of the BCCD's Conservation Currents pieces, a bi-weekly feature written by BCCD board and staff members since August 2006.