Vermont community members have launched the Culvert Crawlers program to monitor and clear the state’s 100,000 culverts. Born from the 2023 floods, the initiative uses a student-developed platform to help overstretched local road crews prioritize maintenance and prevent road washouts caused by intensifying rainfall.
A corrugated metal tube running under a road is a simple piece of infrastructure, but in Vermont, it is the primary line of defense against road failure. When these structures clog, water runs over the road instead of under it, leading to erosion, costly damage, and the downstream transport of sediment.
The Culvert Crawlers program mobilizes volunteers to peer into these tubes and record their condition. This community-led effort transforms residents into an early-warning system for municipalities that lack the workforce to manually inspect every mile of roadway.
The 2023 Flood and the Black River Response
The program emerged from the trauma of the 2023 flood. Kelly Stettner, a Springfield resident with 25 years of experience coordinating river cleanups, was managing volunteers mucking out homes in Ludlow, which sits upstream of Springfield on the Black River. During this period, she noted a pervasive feeling of shell shock among locals, stating, There was a feeling of shell shock in a lot of folks.
Stettner began collaborating with Margo Caulfield, a longtime Cavendish organizer who had coordinated emergency shelters. Their conversations shifted from immediate recovery to long-term resilience, specifically focusing on where the flood mud was originating. Stettner recalled that Margo kept saying, ‘You know, Kel, we’re doing all this flood mud response. We’re taking this flood mud. Where’s it coming from?’
This led them to identify culverts as a critical point of failure.
By the spring of 2024, the effort moved from a conceptual discussion at a Ludlow Dunkin’ Donuts to a technical project. Stettner partnered with Sarah Kelly and Charis Boke, a Dartmouth researcher and anthropologist raised in the Black River area, to build a scalable monitoring system. Boke and Kelly had asked Stettner how they might be able to help with local resilience, to which Stettner responded, You guys ever thought about culverts?
Dartmouth Partnership and Digital Mapping
To make the data useful for officials, the group enlisted Dartmouth students to develop a platform for recording culvert conditions. Volunteers, wearing bright vests, navigate roadside ditches and dense vegetation to check for blockages and road warning signs. They also record the condition of the road and look for warning signs that can tip off road crews that a culvert might need attention.
The resulting data is plotted on a map that local highway departments use to identify which culverts require immediate attention. While some volunteers perform minor clearing, the primary value is the information provided to professional crews.
The accessibility of the tool is a central goal. Stettner, describing her own comfort with the technology, noted, I mean, I’m Wilma Flintstone. If I can use it, anybody can use it.
Impact in Cavendish and Municipal Resource Gaps
Cavendish served as the early test site for the program. The stakes are high in the town, which contains over 700 culverts according to researcher Charis Boke.
Town Manager Rick Chambers confirmed that the program has been a huge help for the highway department. He highlighted a systemic issue facing most municipalities: the lack of time and manpower to proactively walk every road to inspect infrastructure.
Without these volunteers, road crews typically operate on a reactive basis, performing maintenance only after a culvert is visibly backed up. By using community resources to eliminate problems before they happen, the town reduces the risk of catastrophic road failure during storms.
Scaling Community-Led Resilience
The Culvert Crawlers model is designed to be adopted by other communities across Vermont. By complementing official state data with more frequent, localized monitoring, the program aims to create a more resilient road network in the face of intensifying rainfall.
This shift toward community-led monitoring represents a pragmatic response to budget constraints. Rather than waiting for federal or state funding decisions, residents are utilizing a low-cost digital tool to protect their own access to essential services. Margo Caulfield emphasized the necessity of the effort, stating, I think everybody needs to remember that they can be part of the recovery,
and adding, We’re doing everything we can, because it’s going to happen again.
The success in Cavendish suggests that the primary barrier to infrastructure maintenance isn’t necessarily a lack of will, but a lack of eyes on the ground. By bridging that gap with a student-built platform, Vermont towns can move from a cycle of “shell shock” and reactive repair toward a proactive strategy of prevention.
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