And now we can open it up for some questions. We have a couple of good questions in here already. We've had a couple of questions on climate change do. So a couple of folks have talked about this 1.2 times thankful width, which is where we really want the streams to be spanned. We wanna add that extra 20% of width inside the crossing so that we're ready for those big storms.  We saw those numbers that they're, you know, 23% bigger these annual storms.  That's a really good question. And it's really hard to say because when we do the kind of study hydrologic study about how much water comes down from a watershed to its stream crossing, like the ones we just built on the stream table, we're always kind of playing catch up because what do we, we don't usually project precipitation into the future very well. We're looking at what precipitation has happened in recent years and then we can estimate how much water should be coming to our crossing. What we've been using in a StreamSmart approach is trying to build in a really fundamental conservatism essentially in those design plans in our systems. And so one of the things we plan to do and is built into some of the permitting is that we always want to leave 20% vertical space also free for passing debris, for ensuring that our estimate of the, let's say the 100 year flood event is really not gonna be exceeded. And so we're trying to build in a sort of a buffer in our design plans. But the fact is it's hard to say whether we're truly working far enough ahead in that sort of conservatism in those design plans. The good news is, I'll put it this way, if you heard me say in the video that a lot of our culverts in the state of Maine were designed essentially, if they were designed at all and most of them were not, thinking maybe about passing a 10 year flow, a relatively small storm. Some of them you see even in the current state standards are really meant to pass about a 25 year storm event. And in StreamSmart we're really trying to address what we think now is the 100 year flow with additional space. So we think we're doing a pretty good job if we can make progress with StreamSmart crossings across Maine for a lot of these crossings that were designed for 10 year crossings to this current standard of more like a 100 year crossing that we will do very well at being much more resilient in our road network with our stream crossings. Well into the future. Thanks, Alex. We had a lot of climate change questions. So that's great. Here's a kind of specific question but we do get this off and on. How do we design for a situation where it's an outlet of a pond? And you have those fluctuations of the water throughout the season, throughout the year. How do you, and this can be a man-made impairment it can also be a natural impairment. So do you wanna touch on that one a little bit? Sure, that's wading into some interesting waters. And I think the key is the point you just made, Sarah. And that is because most folks don't necessarily realize that almost every pond or a lake in the state of Maine is enhanced, shall we say. If not necessarily by a dam or a real dam by piles of rubble that were put there to enlarge the lake or maintain a higher lake level. And of course, so many people live in Maine on lakes and enjoy them. And so many people come to Maine for its beautiful lakes. And that's fantastic. But when you're a fish, trying to get to a lake to spawn, think about the alewives, the millions of alewives that we've got in Maine and more and more coming all the time thanks to a lot of work folks are doing. They still need to pass whatever kind of obstructions are there. And so it's certainly a question to have about what the appropriate lake level is and then what the appropriate outlet of that lake should look like. It's a relatively simple thing to have a pretty natural rock feature that can be built right into a stream crossing that's designed to stream smart standards or upstream of that crossing or conceivably downstream. There are all sorts of logistical issues to be wrestled with but really that question about how to manage lake levels is separate from stream smart. We can definitely address all those needs but getting back to a point Mary was making earlier if it comes to designing what we call a technical fishway with baffles and weirs and things that is not stream smart. That inevitably leaves some elements of stream smart out. It doesn't really pass the kind of ecological elements that we want and it doesn't pass even all fish let alone often things like macro invertebrates and other elements of the system that we are addressing with stream smart. Inevitably those things are somewhat halfway measures even as expensive as they can be. Thanks Alex. That's a great answer to a tough question. And I know that there have been some stream smart crossings put in that have included those baffles and step pools and it requires so much more engineering and such so much a lot of cost because you're now having to re-engineer a stream where by not allowing it to engineer itself by just opening it back up. But it's a tough one. We have a number of questions about cost but I'm going to actually hold those because we actually have a section on cost and the cost benefits. And we are back right on time. Although I have one more question. Well, here's a question and we'll end with this one and then jump into the next section which where Alex is going to talk about how we build these. So the BMP protocol manual says bankful width is achieved on average every one and a half years. How do you relate this to the usual 2.5 times three times three and a half times cross sectional requirements that are needed for a 25 or 35 year flow? Do you want to answer that now or do it after you go into the details of technical? I'll give a little simple answer to it now but we can come back to it and I would say also about all those. I love to talk about cost and so I'll be very happy when we're wrapping things up later after Sarah's had to talk about cost benefits and things to talk more about cost. I'm happy to do it. So in this instance when we're talking about relationship of the capacity of the crossing that's what we're talking about 2.5 three times however many times of the capacity of the crossing that's the cross sectional area which we'll talk about in a few minutes. That is not about the width of the banks really. So what happens is when a stream fills up to its banks every one, one and a half years whatever we want to call it the water then anytime it gets beyond that it's getting out into its floodplain. And so the energy of the stream gets dissipated to a large extent by those natural floodplains. And so the problem with a crossing is inevitably it has to have a width of some sort. And by going to 1.2 times bank full we're trying to give it what you might call these mini floodplains but essentially we're going to have to make sure that those banks are really tough because the water is simply going to get deeper inside our crossing. It doesn't have access to floodplains and so it does very much affect how we're going to design those things but and it's not always easy to relate those capacities three times cross sectional area to a discrete flow. And I know that doesn't fully answer the question but we'll come back to it. And if anyone wants to further refine a question I'm happy to take another crack at it later. Okay. That's great, thank you. And I think this actually that's a perfect lead into the next section. And Alex is going to stick with us for this one and he is going to walk us through how you actually make these things. Some of the technical aspects which you have to look for and how we measure these things. Let me just pull it up. And I hope you're seeing it. Take it away. Okay, great. Thanks Sarah. So this is sort of the technical part of things but I realized in watching the video as it was kind of painful for me to watch in a way but I was thinking a lot about the fact that I addressed a lot of the issues that are going to come up here but I think repetition is really important. It also helped you to think about it slightly differently. I'll touch on a lot of similar or the same topics as I go through this but I wanted to mention one thing first that we haven't talked about. We have a program called Stream Smart but it is really fundamentally based on a very well-developed program developed over decades ago by the U.S. Forest Service called Stream Simulation Design and I have to give them credit. We decided in Maine that the sort of thousand page manual that is in that program the five day introductory training that's required that all of that is wonderful because it's a very in-depth program. What we tried to do was make things a little more straightforward maybe simplify some elements of it to bring it to everyone so that everyone who's involved in road crossings can understand a lot of these principles better. It really in a way boils down to the simple golden rule shown here. Let the stream act like a stream as much as possible. Even given what I just said about the fact that we have a very hard time building a stream crossing, a culvert and a bridge that actually have floodplains in them that gets very, very expensive. So we're gonna do things to address that. So one of the things I wanna talk about right off the bat is that in StreamSmart we have a whole bunch of options. We haven't necessarily talked about all of them. We've talked about a few, but not all of them. And so I wanna touch on those here. And the first one, which we didn't mention and is not obvious at the outset is if we can possibly avoid creating a crossing we should do that because that's the best option of all. That's very smart. And when we think about forest crossings or new developments of a decent size it is really sensible and planners can be really good at finding their way not to cross a stream, to put in roads, to build road networks so that they don't cross streams. This is something that's being done all the time now where forest management companies are building new roads to access forests for cutting. And it should be done in any case where a new crossing is being considered because it's much cheaper to simply build a similar length of road than to build a stream crossing or to build one further upstream where it's smaller than downstream. The second option I did mention in the video and that was looking at temporary bridges. If you can remove a crossing that you don't really use all the time that is a fantastic thing. But I would say of course this doesn't really relate to town roads and state roads very well. Although I will say that there have been some town roads I've worked on in recent years I won't name the towns where I was recommending they simply decommissioned the crossing. But for all sorts of reasons that was not the option chosen but it is and should be considered one option. If the detour is really short it might be a great way to save money in maintenance and construction over time. So really though what we're here to talk about is mainly option three and that is the installation of open bottom structures that are stream smart. They expand the channel really exceed the span of the channel and so these are bridges bottomless three-sided box culverts arch culverts as well as those temporary bridge situations. And just to clarify a little thing because especially the DOT's definitions of bridge versus culvert it gets a little confusing and I consider a bridge something that has a deck and the road runs right on top of it and a culvert has fill on top of it and it can take all sorts of different forms. It's only when we get down to sort of number four here when we think about our lower choice options and that is to embed a culvert. I just mentioned in the video some of the advantages and disadvantages of those and I'll return to them as we go along further. This last item I'm not sure it should even really be here and I just spoke to it regarding the outlets of lakes and that is when we have to design something that entails a lot of engineering we call it a hydraulic design it's really not fully stream smart because it doesn't actually accomplish all of our stream smart goals. It can be a way to get dish passage for passage of certain organisms but it usually is limited in approach and scope.  You can see I think that that ladder there just to allow construction workers to get side to side is placed right on these beautiful little terrestrial critter banks that are built into that otherwise very rocky surface under. The bottom left is our classic metal box and sometimes this sort of shape can be built out of concrete as well we'll show those where the classic arch culvert they all serve to fulfill stream smart principles. This is an embedded pipe that was installed in the town of New Gloucester a few years ago I spoke to Fox one week after it went in on the bank here inside the crossing. We know those banks serve terrestrial critters and we know they serve the stream really, really well and in this case it was there was a lot of clay and so it was really essential to use a closed bottom box pipe like this embedded in the stream channel to be able to distribute the load of the road and the traffic and all that over burden effectively so they do have their stream smart purposes and some like this, this is a clamshell concrete box I mentioned it in the video you have a bottom section that we were able to put in each piece weighed 40,000 somewhat pounds we had to use a crane it added extra time and complication the crane broke down but the fact is we hope that this crossing in the town of Phillips might last even a hundred years and so the robustness with which these pieces and the whole bridge or box culvert were built really gives great advantages for longevity and has all of the other characteristics of a stream smart crossing and it's operating beautifully. Mary already mentioned this and I just have to say it again some folks don't like it because the folks for instance who developed slip liners we're very proud of the fact that these are wonderful money saving measures and what's interesting is that even though they make a smaller opening the bore of the pipe is now smaller than the old pipe they were inserted inside or built up to replace the fact is they can pass a lot of water especially when they're smooth and plastic but they're not stream smart you end up still with the perch at the outlet you end up with fast flowing water you end up possibly with shallower water they just don't serve the same purposes. What we're after in stream smart is trying to simplify things as I said and so we've come up with this little set of four S's really five S's let's see if you can find the five fifth S and those four S's are really meant just to give us a thumb guideposts rules of thumb to stick to test whether we're really meeting stream smart principles and the first we've talked about a lot already is spanning the stream and not pinching the stream. So this is an eight foot pipe in about a 18 foot stream or 16 foot stream it's classic it's what we're trying to avoid with stream smart we don't wanna pinch the stream pretty basic we want to span the stream and clearly as you've seen so much already we want to exceed the span of the stream so that we can have banks inside the crossing and you can see maybe I'm guessing here a little bit but this is a much happier stream not being pinched down into that small crossing so any of the critters that will pass in this stream upstream and down can pass through this stream smart crossing. I touched on this little element already in the video but I just wanna come back to it because it's really important and helpful I think to remember that if you look in the upper right hand corner you see this overhead view of an undersized color this is sort of the traditional undersized color and think of it like a funnel all that water basically gets stuck up in the open end of the funnel trying to get into that narrow part of the funnel and it inevitably speeds up. So if you look at the main part of the drawing here in the middle water in a bigger flow is backing up at the inlet and then it flushes through that narrow opening at high velocity and it scours at the outlet with turbulence and inevitably that has really fundamental effects in almost every case over time you develop this perch you scoured that material out and piled it up into actually a secondary barrier you don't just have the drop from the pipe you actually have this area of fill material stream material piled up that can be a secondary barrier to passage of fish and other aquatic organisms so that's just a classic and here is a real world example in the town of Blanchard we were lucky enough to capture in photos this is a 12 foot concrete box culvert put in about 2006 but two years before now and already we know it had been developed put in sorry at the stream grade but it had already developed a perch in a very rocky stream channel and a couple years later we went back well, let's see if I can get this to work and the perch had expanded a lot just two years later and that is because this crossing as big as it may seem is woefully undersized this now has about a 40 foot or 35 foot bridge in this place that's working really, really wonderfully but this is just a great example of how undersized culverts evolve and do not work for the stream other key elements of our rules of thumb are getting elevation right setting the elevation right and the slope and skew that's our fifth S match the stream skew meaning alignment how the stream aligns with the road and we have some really simple tests I'd like you to use whenever you come to a stream crossing you're thinking about how well it works in terms of its elevation so indicators of elevation problems coming to a crossing, looking downstream you see a stream flowing it's got all that wonderful wood in it that provides great additional habitat you look upstream and you see a very different situation you see a ponded area you look at the inlet and outlet and you see it's about the same really there's a little bit of water going in coming out it's not actually perched you think, oh, this isn't so bad but whenever you see this disconnect this very different situation upstream and down you know there's a problem usually with elevation but this is rarely natural in this case, a bigger, better stream crossing was put in stream smart design, open bottom arch and the stream channel was rediscovered because the right kind of survey was done to get the right elevation to put in this new crossing and that's the way the stream was meant to be so forest will eventually regrow in that area shade this beautiful little stream and provide the cool waters that our brook trout and salmon love on the opposite end of the spectrum you come to a site like this and you look upstream and down and you see pretty much the same stream you are a lot happier you know that the elevation is, if not perfect much closer for this particular crossing you might notice that this crossing isn't great because it's not full of substrate I can see metal corrugations in the bottom but boy, if all of our stream crossings were like this we wouldn't have as many problems with stream connectivity as we do what we're looking for is seamless inlets and outlets we don't wanna see a disruption in the stream channel this is one that looks very raw because it was just finished last summer here in this photo but you can see here one of the nice little factors is those banks inside the crossing that's sort of a number of purposes I'll come back to talking about more in a little bit but we wanna see a lack of no disruption in the stream our final S is substrate which is kind of the technical term I mentioned it in the video for sediment the material in the stream bottom and this cannot be overstated how important that natural substrate is in a crossing if you look at a crossing like this okay, it lacks banks which is a little sad but otherwise having this natural substrate in the crossing makes the stream act in the crossing very much like it does upstream and downstream you may not notice it or realize it but every time the stream flow comes past every one of these little rocks cobbles small boulders you get immense varieties of velocity you get these little eddies where any critter trying to move upstream through this crossing is gonna be able to take advantage of those little eddies those little changes of velocity that may be using them partly to feed, to get food that may be mostly using them to rest and to make their way to navigate through the crossing so I cannot overstate how important having natural substrate in a crossing and having it match the upstream and downstream areas is to a stream smart crossing okay, so how do we get there? It's really important to break this down into a couple sections because the first step is field survey or assessment we could say and that has three different elements to it we have a stream profile, cross sections and the substrate assessment to try to figure out what the natural stream is like before we can get to design and the step one is in the past is what has been underdone in many ways and so I wanna really dwell on that now and you're gonna hear a lot more about it and then we'll be able to get to some of the design issues that are really vital to stream smart so our field survey until these three parts profile, cross sections and substrate answers a lot of questions for us if we do it right our stream profile gives us our bed elevation our slope, the potential for scour of the natural stream so that means where we need to put our footings or abutments it tells us about what kind of capacity structure we can build given the road height and what we need cross sections tell us essentially about the width but also about the shape of the stream and elevation of stream banks in relation to the stream bottom and the substrate characterization or assessment tells us about that bed material size but also can tell us a lot about what material we need to build the banks with so that they'll be stable over time and the stream material you need to remember when you think about stream smart and stream simulation design which it's built on spends a lot of energy and time on this is you want a dynamic stream so that the material comes in and it moves out at the same way it would in a natural section of the stream that's why it's so important so step one of our field survey is working on our stream profile we get out with a survey instrument and I'm gonna give you several examples here of surveys and I'll give you a little cartoon to show you how we do it but the critical critical thing is that we measure well upstream and downstream from the crossing in order to get enough information to be able to know how to do a correct design so our standard is 20 to 30 times the width of the stream in distance each way so that translates for a 10 foot stream like this one essentially is up here in the little profile you see a 10 foot stream we need to go at least 200 feet up and 200 feet down that's 400 feet which we've just exceeded on this one but really more like 600 feet is probably a better number for any of these crossings that it's really important to go far enough and it just doesn't take much extra time money anything to get that bit of information that is really helpful and this is my cartoon about how you do it it's pretty simple the white shows the stream bottom as well as the road elevation the green is the little instrument we're gonna use to survey the culvert is orange in place and the water level is thrown in there as well and you can notice that the outlet of this culvert goes down into a pretty deep pool doesn't seem to match any of the other pools in the stream, right? That is totally normal with an undersized stream crossing it's an anomalous unrepresentative pool it does tell us a little something about what can happen under severe conditions in this stream and that can teach us a little bit of something but the survey process is really simple depending on what kind of survey instrument you use all you're trying to do is capture the highs and the lows in a pool and riffle stream which a lot of our streams are in Maine you're gonna be capturing the top of the riffle and the deepest part of the pool top of riffle, deepest part of pool and that's essentially all we're trying to capture because that tells us so much if we connect the top of those features from the natural stream upstream where we've gone well upstream to well downstream it gives us our stream slope and that's great and it gives us the elevation around the stream crossing of where we think our stream elevation will be the top of our stream and if we connect the bottom of those features the average bottom of those pools we're going to know how deeply this stream tends to scour inside its banks based on all the storms that have happened in that stream and however many years it's been going as it has so that's critical, critical information and you simply don't learn it if you don't go far enough away from the road because that area around the road is disturbed this gives us the information we need to put in a new larger lower stream crossing to stream smart standards. So let's look at a couple of examples more examples of stream profiles because there's a really classic signature that comes from these profiles and so I want you to learn a little bit about how to read them right here if you like this kind of stuff you'll be really into it I love this stuff if you don't love it I hope you can pick up a few important rules of thumb notice the stream bottom in brown there notice the gray dashed line that's the one that's meant to connect the upstream natural portions of the stream way downstream to the natural stream and trying to connect those gives us a 0.7% slope and you'll notice that there's a whole bunch of the brown material and the culvert itself well above that line it tells us this culvert is not at the right elevation and that material is accumulated upstream and often downstream partly from being scoured out of that deep scour pool partly maybe from all the little road washouts that had happened by this culvert being too small for its stream and then look at the red dashed line that we don't have a perfect data here but connecting the stream bottoms roughly gives us in a parallel roughly parallel line to the top of the stream features the typical scour that this stream undergoes and just take a moment to look again at that scour pool it is completely anomalous it may look similar to the big one downstream but in fact this is about almost four feet deep versus the one downstream which is about two feet deep and so this is really very anomalous for this stream and it's all about stream elevation and undersized culvert pipe here's another one this is in the town of Phillips is one of my favorite sites that's a two and a half foot pipe a 30 inch pipe in what is about an eight foot stream what I'd like you to notice first is on the bottom of the graph notice how far we went to survey this little stream we went a hundred times the stream width and frankly it wasn't much more difficult than going 30 times upstream and 30 times downstream but what we got from going that far is the ability to connect this gray dash line from the truly undisturbed area upstream to the truly undisturbed area downstream and as with the previous one you notice all of this material is accumulated in part because of the culvert being set too high and it's too small this is a very messy site the road commissioner in the town of Phillips lives up the road and past this site every day and every year had to deal with problems from this undersized crossing and so we came in to help and he and we were very happy not to do it the old way if we had done it the old way we would have looked upstream from the road 50 feet and downstream surveyed it maybe in detail and we would have got the slope kind of right but the elevation would have been totally wrong because we would have been looking essentially at the current elevation of the culvert if we'd done it the minimum minimum standard going 20 times upstream and 20 times downstream we would have got the slope close to right too and the elevation would have been better lower but still we would have been reading of disturbed stream a stream that was really messed up for decades by an undersized culvert so we went further and it does take a little time to develop the sort of skill to understand what you're looking at in the field but I have to say that it is so easy to go a little bit further it is so critical to capture that extra bit of information that tells us where the natural stream is and what that then tells us about how to design the right elevation the green dashed line here which is about three feet lower than the existing culvert and not to mention the sizing which we'll get to along the way this stream profile is critical the next step is cross sections to get it sizing and the simplest way to do that this is a graphic comes from a best management practice manual of the main forest service I believe is to take simple measurements from bank to bank you're measuring the width at normal high water or perhaps the bank full width as we call it often right at the base of the woody vegetation on the sides of the stream this is where normally when water every year every year and a half or so gets up and starts heading out into the flood plain you're measuring that width several times to get an average and across those measurements you're gonna take average depth measure you're gonna take depth measurements and then average them in this most simple form you've got a six foot wide stream with an average of one foot depth that's a six foot square foot cross sectional area for this one little stream so when you're talking about trying to meet the state standards you'd be talking about three times that or when you're talking about stream smart I would throw out a rule of thumb to you five times that to get closer to stream start smart characteristics if you're really trying to pass larger flows let's just reflect on that for a moment so we are not necessarily being forced by state law and regulation to meet the highest standard but what we're talking about in stream smart is trying to achieve a higher standard that will truly make our roads better protected and more resilient over time to a higher standard a more complex looking crossing is a little bigger one this is almost 17 feet across in the town of Farmington using a more sophisticated survey instrument gives us a little more detail 17 foot wide, two and a half foot depth maximum depth in this case about a 42 square foot cross sectional area and it is at any one of these cross sections that normally we do them always in riffles when there's a riffles and pools in a stream we will do what we call a pebble count this is where we do our substrate assessment and we do a randomized measurement randomized selection of pieces from the stream and we measure them and that gives us a distribution of material this is a perfect example to use here because in this crossing being designed it's going to be put in this coming summer the engineer who did the final designs wants to put in a big embedded clamshell concrete box and in order to rebuild the stream which will have to be done inside that box we have to have this distribution information to know how to match the natural stream character okay that's a lot of assessment I'd love to talk about that all day but I want to get into design and design starts in some ways or maybe this comes later thinking about what your options are for structure types and there are many and it's wonderful I could also talk about this all day but just want to give you some sense of some of the variety of structured choices that you have the upper left is what we call an open bottom box this is built out of concrete blocks extremely robust flexible in its sort of Lego nature and built the right way armored well it can be extremely stable and wonderful the arch in the upper right is also concrete and will be set on the same sort of abutments or footings the lower right is our open bottom box covered in metal often it's the most wonderful thing about it is it comes on a small flatbed truck in many pieces the scary part is that some of them built in a large size can have thousands, three or four thousand nuts and bolts to put it together but each one of these different structure types has its advantages and disadvantages the pipe arch in the lower right is key to putting in embedded pipes and distributing load in weak soils especially and these often also come in a multi-plate variety that need to be assembled but you've got your bridges like I showed earlier you've got this embedded pipe in the upper right is one of those multi-plate pipe arches that was put in the new Gloucester the bottomless concrete box in the lower right is in that stream that I just dwelt on a lot with that stream profile with the two and a half foot pipe elevated three feet too high and so this is in place now operating really well in the town of Phillips and in Whitefield in the lower left is one of these concrete arches all examples of the kind of variety types for stream smart here's a good example of a site that you saw before in the upper right hand corner that don't pinch a stream photo totally restored to good connection upstream to down the old eight foot piping is noted in red essentially in the photo and you see the cross section that is there in white was not very well represented by the previous pipe at all and so now it is in this big open bottom arch with banks passing huge storms with ease some of those are more and less expensive than others this is a good example of how inexpensively you can do work on low volume roads these can be forest roads this case it's a very little used town road and this can be true for driveways and other places as well we had a terribly functioning multiple culvert before that was perched and not working well for the stream crossing this was less than $12,000 was a few years ago but extremely inexpensive because it have used steel I beams that are plenty strong enough for the loads that are being put here a timber deck in this case that yes needs to be maintained but is extremely inexpensive to build so there are lots of options for different types of roads this is one I showed earlier this is in the town of Phillips a failing crossing you'll see several images of this coming up in which in the town spent it's pretty much its entire road budget for the year to put in this incredibly strong embedded concrete box culvert this was in the age before they later got some access to DEP culvert upgrade grant funding for other crossings in town and so they spent a lot of money on this but the reason they did it is because the road commissioner knew how many problems there were with this crossing and that the stream smart solution was the right solution for the long term and they were thinking about the dollars all the way along and chose to make this choice as an investment not just in the stream that was true but certainly for the roads for the town this is that three-sided box culvert I showed before in Phillips the pipe as it looked before and now again I don't need to say much more about this although again this is very inexpensive just up the road from that previous crossing we came in with help from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge crew who came out to teach the town with their new excavator how to do this kind of installation properly so that they could then do it on a whole bunch of other crossings throughout the town themselves without a lot of extra help and it was extremely inexpensive in Whitefield different crossing looks very similar in terms of pipe size and degraded nature of the crossing this was one of the first DEP culvert upgrade bond grants given with a great solution stream smart and along the way when we're doing our designs you're inevitably going to come up with an elevation like this showing the inlet of the crossing or maybe the outlet I just want to show you this one because it shows you the relative scale of change that sometimes happens this once again is that little crossing in Phillips that was three feet too high way too small it was about five square feet previously passing very little water causing all sorts of problems for the road and the stream it's now been increased about ten times that yes it seems dramatic but in fact as I just said this was actually quite inexpensive and the town never really needs to worry about this crossing again for what might be a hundred years according to some folks who have assessed the situation okay I can talk all day again about these structures but I want to get on to other really key elements of the design process and each one of these could entail lots and lots of talk I am not a professional hydrologist but we do hydrology when we do our basic plans for stream smart and engineers out there do this as well and we are so lucky to have a set of tools available from the US Geological Survey that allow us to get data on any stream crossing in the state for design purposes so if you look here that label looking at site 10405 in the town of Porter is pointing to that red dot we can go in with our set of tools online free and generate that drainage area just essentially by clicking on the point you can generate that yellow drainage area for that particular point and not just that but a whole slew of data that comes along with us with it it tells you how big that drainage area is and a number of other important factors that relate to it but key is on the right here it tells us for different return periods essentially different storm sizes that happen at different frequencies or different probabilities in this case it's old data if you see the 100 on the lower left second to last row that is meant in this data to represent the 100 year storm event it's a storm that has a 1% chance of happening in the given year it's a flow estimate that comes with that storm from this watershed that's a lot of cubic feet per second to be handling in your crossing and that's what we're trying to design for and so we have another free set of tools that comes from the US Federal Highway Administration and I've conferred I've actually been trained by a professional hydraulic engineer in Maine who uses some much more sophisticated modeling programs to do this kind of design work but he assures me and us that this program called HY8 for most simple culvert situations does a wonderful job of estimating the hydraulic forces the energy the velocities of flow and the elevation of the water for our design for stream smart crossings and so we use it all the time and just for you to understand a little bit about what's happening here on the left side of the graphic and water elevation coming into the crossing as a blue line that represents where the water elevation will be during a 100 year storm event according to our current design and we can do this it's really easy to iterate this with lots of different designs you can go wider, you can go higher you can go all sorts of different ways with your design and get different results that are essentially posted on the right-hand side so you can look at the depth of water look at the estimated velocity of the flow during even that 100 year storm which in this case is extremely reasonable for some fish even though most fish during a big storm like that are not moving much, they're hunkered down trying to protect themselves but the good news is that even at that big flow we are designing things with space to spare as I mentioned before we want to leave space both sort of for conservatism in terms of thinking ahead to climate change but also passing debris during those big storms because that is how the Freeport culvert failed, that is how the DOT crossing up in Carabacid Valley failed that is how many culverts fail because it's during those big storms that the debris comes down and we should pass it through our stream smart crossings wow okay so I want to stop here for a moment we're going to have a few more slides for sure but to pause and think about other design considerations in the permitting section you already heard about this and I just want to reiterate you need to start early in talking to the various folks who might have jurisdiction over your stream crossing it is extremely helpful they are extremely helpful to talk to about what you need to do for permits remembering that the in-stream work window as several folks have mentioned going back to I think Mary mentioned it maybe earlier is July 15th to September 30th is the work window for most stream crossings in the state of Maine your plans whenever you're trying to do a stream smart crossing design you really need to have all of that data shown in appropriate way not necessarily in my cartoonish way in my concept designs but perhaps in CAD programs or something else to show the stream profile to show cross sectional area to show peak flow elevations from your hydraulic modeling all of that needs to feed in both to the permitting but also to just understanding how well your stream smart crossing is going to work and be built other folks have mentioned it again previously but I cannot overstress how critical controlling water and sedimentation during construction is it is done really well by some folks and some folks just don't spend enough time on it so we'll talk more about that in a minute there are other issues to be dealt with as well thinking about when you have special situations of lots of bedrock in your stream to work around that in your design unstable soils where you really should be doing geotechnical work that is boring usually to assess the subsurface materials to know what the bearing capacity of those soils are that's not something you can just do with an easy rule of thumb and finally building bed and banks I'll come back to in a couple minutes because I think it's really critical to do well so here's one of my cartoon drawings this is a water control plan for that little site in philips where we had a lot of problems and just gives you some of the basic elements to think through when you're thinking about controlling water we don't know when the weather is going to be coming during construction and yes sometimes we can simply stop construction or move it but often we can't so we need to build in a lot of safety and so we think about you'll see these block nets here we actually screen fish we keep fish out of the site and in this area which is known to have Atlantic salmon in it we actually fish the site with an electrofishing unit and move fish out of the construction zone ahead of time we have those coffer dams in place to control flow and we are either pumping as we did here around the site to maintain stream flow or we're having a bypass I'll show you some examples of that in a moment and we're filtering the dirty water out in an effective filtration system and there are a number of them that we use in this case I was being a bit creative by using this swale out to the side to filter some of the water we ended up having to switch that and use another portion of the forest to filter you always want to be thinking about having adequate pumps capacity hose lengths it's really simple stuff but if you don't think it through you're not going to be ready when construction happens so when you have big streams like this in this case coffer dams are actually the footings on the outside of the stream and essentially the stream itself is bypassing right down the middle because it was essentially too big to control with pumps in this case this is the side of the big embedded concrete box culvert in Phillips where the construction crew the engineer decided to have bypass channel specially built to carry beautiful clean water from the stream down and around the muddy mess that they were making to dig that deep hole to put in the embedded concrete box but the isolation was pure and complete and wonderful and all that dirty water though had to go somewhere and so it got filtered out in the floodplain with a number of these filtration basins to keep the dirty water out of the stream so okay here's my one of my favorite topics and I've been working really hard on it in recent years like last year this is the Deargo Timberlands construction crew in Charleston where we built five crossings with them last year and here I want to show you a little bit about the process of of installing banks not so much bed but banks alone and that always entails a layering effect and here I want you to see the size of spread footings that we sometimes put in to distribute the load of abutments across a less than ideal soil so this is a spread footing and we want we know from our careful serving our stream profile that this footing is below the level of likely scour for this stream even with the factor of safety put in and still what we're going to do is pile rock on top of those footings and what you can't see here on the right is an entire layer of this rock that's been carefully sized by looking at the natural stream channel and by doing other processes of estimation using formula formula some like one from the Army and engineers to make sure that these pieces will be stable even in big flows and we put down a layer of that material within layer finds on top of it and if we have water available we are watering those finds in to fill the voids in the big rock material I'm going to talk to you more about why we do that but it's important element of building good banks we then put more rock on and more finds shown over here to the right as we work on the left side as well two layers of rock underneath finds and then rock on top and all that to build these final banks you don't even notice how much is going on underneath these banks but believe me we work very hard to make them extremely robust because those banks serve three really critical purposes I spoke to this a little bit in the video first those banks give us the right shape of the stream that matches our cross sections that we did we have a natural stream where when the water gets really low and this is closed for construction but when the water starts flowing and it's low in the summer it gets focused to a narrower section of channel in the middle instead of just being spread out like it does in a traditional concrete box covered with no substrate in it but also of course we've talked a lot about it that material in the foundation of the banks is armoring to maintain these banks and to protect the footings but critical also is that we want to be able to pass over time sustainably terrestrial critters like the one you might be able to see here we want to make sure all four corners of these banks are connected to the natural stream banks otherwise we want them to be connected at all four corners and too often the last phase of construction entails a lot of dumping of riprap that ends up closing off the corners a little bit notice this wildlife it's not exactly wildlife but during construction house cat came by and I thought it was a perfect example to capture because in fact we do see all the time animals I think one of the figures I've seen is 85% of terrestrial critters in your watershed travel at some time along stream channels maybe they're just getting a drink of water maybe they're hunting they're not prefer to go up over a road when they can go under a crossing like this so that's one of the elements of stream smart design that we're always trying to work hard on but as much as I've said I like to talk about this stuff and I think it's pretty obvious to you I do I love it in fact we don't have all day and so I'm going to leave you with a few comments here you'll have a chance to ask more questions we can have a discussion at the end of today's workshop but you're going to have questions if you're new to stream smart survey installation when are you going to seek help in any of that realm being new to stream smart you're probably going to seek help but there are lots of other situations such as represented for instance by the photo in the background you may have a stream site crossing site that's been completely wiped out and you'll need help trying to discern what happened here where the natural stream is you may have geotechnical challenges that go beyond certainly my skills and you need to confer on what to do whether it's in bedrock or clay subsurface materials tidal streams Mary mentioned early on in this are really critical to getting sea run fish up in some cases excuse me to their upstream spawning areas but they're also simply critical for salt marshes and their correct operation and this approach in stream smart doesn't really address the depth of additional layers of assessment of tidal stream crossings and so we're lucky to have this new program coming soon to Maine called coast wise which is essentially a sister program to stream smart specifically focused at tidal streams you should get help on tidal streams and finally there are all sorts of safety and traffic issues that come into play sometimes in design if you're working on a busy road like DOT always is they often need to stage construction to create a bypass road you may need to do other things to maintain traffic flow that do add logistical challenges to any stream crossing let alone stream smart I hope though in the end you'll remember our four S's or five S's to keep things relatively simple remember these rules of thumb and remember most of all the golden rule of stream smart to let the stream act in time I think Sarah you can come on back I'll give you back control and maybe we can have a discussion we're going to we have a few good questions in the Q&A but what we're going to do first is run through this last segment and then we'll open it up to all the questions thank you Alex that was fantastic no this is great so we're going to run through the last bit people have been asking questions about already it's the financial bit so and there were a couple of good questions that hopefully will be answered when we jump into this I can share and I am going to be joined by John McLean he's the administrator for the Department of Environmental Protections culvert replacement grant program let's get going a lot of questions in the question and answer box keep them coming a lot of those questions were on costs or as you might think of it that's great but how do we pay for all this there are a lot of folks who are like yeah I'd love to do that but this is an expensive endeavor so I want to run through some of the cost benefit calculations on stream smart design and we do hear from towns a lot in particular because but really for everyone looking at stream smart when we're replacing a small culvert the upfront cost for stream smart design is higher that's a fact we're putting in bigger structures basically to allow the stream to act like a stream and a lot of particularly municipalities you may have an annual budget and maybe be very limited and you don't want to be thinking am I going to plow the roads this winter or am I going to have a stream smart design so I want to go through some of the opportunities that there are that we do get some folks who are like we know how to put in crossing structures we've been doing this for decades and there was actually a great question in the Q&A that said you know I've heard from the town who says it's cheaper to just keep replacing the culverts let them wash out and then we just replace them it's cheaper than to do that than to put in one of these big fancy expensive stream smart designs and I'm hoping that at the end of this you will change your mind on that or they will change their mind on that so I'm going to go through the big picture and for the long term not just one year at a time and we're really getting to a point where we can't afford to not use stream smart designs we have public safety that we need to think about it about in the stream crossings but we also have the economic risks that we're that we need to think about when we have road closures we've already talked about climate change a couple of times we are seeing bigger more frequent storms already and we can't afford that and then you need to think about your maintenance costs year after year after year shoring up your undersized culvert it's going to in the long haul be more expensive than just putting in a good crossing and there is financial assistance out there there are a lot of different programs depending on where you are what your resources are and what the situation is that you can get help in putting in stream smart crossings the one factor that you will find in most of those stream smart design it's a lot harder to get money to just keep putting in small pipes so some of these public safety community costs you have to think about the immediate threat of the road collapsing that's a clear public safety issue but you also have to think about if you have to close a road because it gets overtopped regularly now you have to think about your emergency vehicle detours and what harm is that putting your public safety in the road is potentially happening with the public with those detours and you can end up with individuals and communities who end up isolated we saw that with Hurricane Irene whole sections of Vermont were cut off for weeks and that has huge public safety implications those are sort of the obvious thing but you also need to think about the economic impact if your road is failing a lot you're spending a lot of money shoring it up replacing those small culverts closing the roads having folks out there to maintain that closure but you also have to think about your community to think about your businesses if your businesses can no longer get access to their goods and services they can't get their staff to work and they can't get their customers in that costs them money so in the big picture it is it's not just the cost of that culvert it's all of the economic implications of the area and over time repeated flooding affects property values and so again real-world, real-time economic impacts of repeated flooding and we've already talked about how climate change is increasing extreme precipitation events this was data that was collected just using the weather stations all across the country going back to 1948 between 1948 and 2011 New England the highest change in size and frequency of these large annual storms you can see that by the size of the dots Maine in particular is seeing the largest annual storms increasing by 23% in that time and the frequency by 74% so they're happening almost twice as often and a quarter again bigger than they had been so we have to stop building roads like it's 1950 because the weather isn't the same as it was in 1950 and that's leading a lot of folks to look at this not just fish passage but also flood risk and how can we evaluate that and how can we prioritize our crossings so the Nature Conservancy is using a lot of the data that Mary showed on that map with the dots showing all the culverts across the whole state using that information from actual measurements and then doing some modeling with GIS and other things to evaluate all of those and say well what happens in what would happen in a 25 year flood so that we can prioritize which of these crossings have fish passage issues and are at high flood risk so that we know where to start they're hoping to put out an actual tool like the map that Mary showed that's available now but this would include not just fish passage but also that flood risk so we're hoping to have that out and available to the public soon. And this gets to that question of the upfront cost versus the long-term cost yes stream smart crossings are usually more expensive it depends but they are usually more expensive putting in a bigger structure but you need to look at the cost over time because it isn't just that one time upfront cost the graph on the bottom right there shows the comparison of cost over 50 years the blue line that sort of slants up is your standard round pipe and it's much cheaper than the stream smart arch or box crossing as you can see because they're much higher for their initial cost but once you put in those stream smart crossings you don't go back to them there's no additional maintenance cost you're not replacing them for within that 15 year time span but you see that the blue traditional arch or pipe that line goes up because there's annual maintenance and then you're going to be replacing that more frequently and those replacements actually do cost and they add up and at the end of 50 years you've spent more money with a poorer functioning system and increase in public safety issues and all the other things that I just talked about to save a little money upfront but in the end it costs you more even in if you were only looking at the crossing itself in Massachusetts they did the same and they found that it was almost 40% cheaper over 30 years to use a stream smart type crossing compared to a traditional small round pipe so there is help available to defray those costs because it may be great that over 50 or 100 years it's going to be cheaper but you still need that money upfront you still need the money to put it in so there are places you can go there are a lot of different places and they all depend on some are available for different project proponents some are more available depending on the aquatic resources that are there how much improvement you expect to get for that aquatic resource where you are in the state there are some resources available in some parts of the states and not others there is usually a requirement for additional funds so these programs usually don't pay higher costs for the crossing so if you're a town you may have to put some money in or get additional funds from other programs to piece together and of course everything having to do with funding all depends on the year and what's available and what's going on economically but one of the most consistent things is that all of this financial assistance requires stream smart designed to even be eligible and just to run through a few of these places where there is funding available and then I'll touch specifically on one and I'm going to have John McLean talk about the DEP program the Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS has a number of regional conservation partnership programs and I'll touch on that in a minute that is specifically for private landowners NOAA often has grant funds available for stream crossings because as Mary showed Maine's the last place with viable Atlantic salmon habitat and so it's really to restore those habitats and access the Maine Natural Resources Conservation Program sometimes has funding it depends on where you are and what funding they have available US Fish and Wildlife Service has a program called Partners for Fish and Wildlife there's sort of between staffing so that program's on hold now but we hope that that will come back as well and then sometimes funding available if it's in a target area that they're working in Trout Unlimited the Nature Conservancy Atlantic Salmon Federation often there are funds available through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation so there are a lot of places that you can piece together funding and then of course there's the Maine DEP stream crossing upgrade grant program that is for municipalities specifically and we'll have a little segment by John McLean on that in just a second I just want to specifically touch on the Natural Resources Conservation Service Program of the RCPP, the Regional Conservation Partnership Program this is a partnership program so they usually include a number of different partners and a lot of them are the partners that I listed at the very very start of the day all of these different partners that work on stream smart crossings NRCS itself provides that technical and financial assistance they will go out and do the surveys and figure out the design and provide funding for the crossing itself it is geared solely at private landowners this is not available for towns it is a voluntary program it's competitive so you really need to have good aquatic resources in the area that you are benefiting through the crossing replacement it is a reimbursement program so they don't just hand you the cash they reimburse you at a flat rate that they have standard tables on and there are currently two of these RCPP programs in Maine and another one in the works because the two that are here now are both sort of at the end of their time span the first one is in blue over here in the western mountains of Maine and that one and that project ends this year but they've spent about $200,000 for aquatic organism passage projects which is replacing culverts to allow fish passage so this was just about done and I wish I had the numbers on how many projects that they did but they did a number of projects and they've spent out that $200,000 the other is a larger program and it's outlined here in red it's almost the entire state except for Eristic and Cumberland County they have $4 million it's being led by the Nature Conservancy they still have another year and they have put in a ton of different projects all over this project area again that project ends next year they still have a few sites left that they're looking at for this year and next but then there's another RCPP being proposed by a group of partners to get going after this year that would be we're estimating that twice as big as the one that we have outlined here in red and if that gets approved that could be a substantial amount of funding available and looking at really reconnecting whole systems and looking at private and public roadways and crossing structures so that would be really exciting if that comes through and we hope that we'll hear about that this year there's a ton of information available on our website that is StreamSmartMain.org there is a handout with links to some of these resources technical and financial resources the RCPP and DEP's grant program as well so I want to now switch over to John's program on the DEP grant program because I know that a lot of folks have used that and it is a fantastic program that many of us have worked to make sure it's funded every year hi everyone I'm glad to be here with you today for the StreamSmart Phase 1 workshop my name is John McLean the administrator of the main DEP Municipal Stream Crossing Grants program in today's workshop I'll share some basic information about DEP funding for municipal stream crossing projects and some basics to help you make the best of your application to date the program has awarded over $15 million in funding for stream crossing upgrades matched by other funding sources there will be $4 million in grants available in 2021 now this is a competitive program and the scoring is based on how well the project meets the program's goals for this round the maximum award amount is $125,000 per project grant scoring is based on the project's contribution to competitive grant program goals including that it improves public safety and reduces flooding it advances the goals of restoring habitat for fish including sea run fish and native brook trout and wildlife and it represents an efficient and cost effective investment now I'll give you a hint most of these criteria can be attained by proposing, designing and installing stream smart road crossings there are some elements you can't change like presence of salmon but a good stream crossing design will alleviate flooding help restore habitat and fisheries and is a good investment when done properly on the safety and flooding portions of the proposal which accounts for 25% of the total score our scoring will consider the extent to which the proposed project allows communities to more effectively prepare for storm and flood events the urgency the degree of urgency of the proposed project including whether a culvert is at high risk of failure due to age, condition, location within a watershed or reach within high flood risk or severe flood history and the contribution to stormwater and flooding management the reduction in frequency or severity of flooding for upstream and downstream communities whether the project meets or exceeds the department of transportation's 100 year flood standard the fish and wildlife section accounts for 50% of the total score some of this section's aspects overlap with other elements but this is the biggest section so the more information you can get here the better your chances scoring for this section is based on the extent to which the proposed project advances the goals of restoring habitat for fish including sea run fish and native brook trout priority status of the culvert to be upgraded or replaced for native brook trout and sea run fish restoration based on available stream survey data statewide prioritization for aquatic connectivity and presence in priority watersheds of salmon alewives and other diagamous fishes we're also looking that the project advances the goals of restoring habitat for wildlife such as with design features like stream banks for terrestrial passage we want to see that the design standard of at least 1.2 times the stream bank full width is met with a natural stream bottom or an embedded structure spend some time really looking into the information that's available at our fingertips from the mainstream habitat viewer to our state's fisheries biologist to mains beginning with habitat program which offers maps on fish and wildlife habitat in the state for the cost section which is the final 25% of the score the extent to which the proposed project represents an efficient and cost effective investment including the proportion of total project funding that will be provided from other sources the potential avoided costs associated with the proposed project and other efficiencies showing the project is a good investment of public money I'd highly encourage you to apply for the funding if you have any issues that we've talked about but in order to be competitive you'll have to put in some legwork to show that the crossing will be stream smart to apply you must qualify and to qualify the project must be located on a municipal road not a state or private road and the crossing must be a culvert bridges are currently not eligible for the program eligible project sponsors include local governments municipal conservation commissions soil and water conservation districts and private nonprofit organizations to give a little bit of predictability here's our plan for the next round of grants the request for proposals or RFP and application will be available in late summer of this year with applications set to be due in mid-November check back for the exact dates as we haven't yet established those we will also keep our website up to date with these as we have the information you can also email me at the email at the end of this presentation once again my name is John McLean and if you'd like to make sure you get information about grants or the upcoming deadlines send me an email if you send a question during the open period of the RFP which will be later this summer I won't be able to directly answer your questions but I will list the question and the answer on the RFP page thank you and I look forward to seeing your excellent proposals this fall okay thank you John that we have covered so much this morning for everyone now is your chance to pepper us with questions or just absorb what we have just shared with you we do have some good questions in the Q&A box I don't know if panelists want to turn on their screen so I don't feel alone up here and we can go through some of these questions and I hope that the couple of questions on costs were addressed in the little bit that I did I really do think in the big picture the cost the cost benefit analysis shows that the stream smart crossings are much more beneficial there were a couple of questions about the technical aspects of how do you measure bank full width and things like that I want to put in a plug for another stream smart training that we often do that Alex is often on and some of the other partners here we have a field based training this is our phase one introductory workshop and we in the fall usually do a couple of two day field based trainings and hopefully we will be able to do it this year hopefully we will all be vaccinated and able to get together again we actually take you out in the field we teach you how to measure the stream we teach you how to collect all the information we use the software and design a stream smart design so it's really exciting I don't know Alex if you want to get into any of the specifics of some of one of the questions was are there different ways to measure bank full width or a guidance document to go to other than everything that's on stream smart main.org of course because there are a lot of resources there well I like I said in my presentation earlier I could talk about this stuff all day but I think really there's just nothing that substitutes for getting out in the field so my first pump would be for somebody attending if they really want to know about assessment how to measure bank full width to get to one of those phase two trainings but certainly even a discussion with me we can connect by email would help to clarify because certainly there's some confusion elements to it some of them are normal high water versus bank full width and some of it is subtle but most of it really just comes down to a lot of practice getting out in the field and looking for the basic indicators that we talk about when we're trying to measure those distances those widths and also doing many of them that's the key is really taking a whole bunch of measurements and then averaging them and you get a sense of how best to do it I have a document somewhere that I'll try to dig up for when we're training are we've done such a great job I think Sarah and others mentioned how well we've done at surveying basic stream crossings in Maine more than any other jurisdiction its size in the world and in training those folks we have some pretty basic elements to look for and measuring bank full width and I could post that on the stream smart website that's great Alex thank you we've had a couple of questions on how do we how do we convince towns to do this how do we get more streams from our crossings on the landscape and a couple of folks said I've got one near my house and how do I get my time to do something I'll start by saying get your folks from town to come to some of these trainings to understand some of the basics of what we're talking about in the big picture and also the financial resources that are available and because that's often the biggest hurdle that folks have and if you are a citizen of the town and you get other citizens of your town asking your town to do these things hopefully the groundswell will bring you to the right place I don't know if anyone else wants to jump on that yeah sure go right ahead sorry Alex didn't mean to steal your thunder you know talking with town managers and DPW meeting folks in the field Lucien and I we'll go out there and meet we'll try to get someone from my FNW with a little bit of knowledge on the stream we're always encouraging people to attend stream smart so that they understand this stuff big a big deal is the DEP stream crossing grant and now there's a funding mechanism the towns really you really can't say we don't have the money if they don't even try for the grant we're really promoting the combination of stream smart and a funding mechanism and working that a lot of word of mouth the chorus tried to do a lot of outreach whether it's with the engineering firms across the state we're trying to get in front of the organization for DPW excuse me and just really promoting this stuff before once you get an excavator and dump trucks on site the cost of the culvert at that point or the stream smart is really minor in the grand scheme of all the costs so just try to provide a lot of the information that has been given here today to those people in the field face to face despite COVID and I'd love to speak to a very particular question that Michael McDonald asked really early on at this very point too I have direct examples I won't name the towns right now but one that comes to mind was one of the first recipients of a DEP upgrade grant that I worked really hard to get for them and it turned out in this particular town one of the three selectmen was very interested and saw all the validity of this I'm not sure he may have been to a stream smart workshop in fact but the road commissioner was quite uncomfortable with folks who I think was mentioned another question who is really they're used to doing small round culverts they know how to do it their equipment is suitable for it they just have a backhoe not a big excavator so there are a lot of sort of reticence based on experience or lack of experience and so I think this these very workshops are really key and getting people the information from stream smart from the website and from anyone like all these really helpful people about the options and the advantages of stream smart crossings that's the way to make progress I think and so I'm very happy always to talk to road commissioners and other town officials to help them understand why we're doing this why we think it is advantageous and not just from an ecological standpoint this is really about roads and infrastructure too it's a great investment thanks folks let's continue on the theme of costs and get to one of the thornier topics which is private crossings I talked about the NRCS program that is really mostly used by timber companies and farmers and not as much neighborhoods because that's not really the folks the NRCS targets for service and it has been trickier to get funding for private crossings which from a biologist perspective it's really hard to fathom because the fish don't care who own that road or that crossing and there are still public safety issues if someone needs to use that roadway in the past I believe the DEP funding used to cover road associations they specifically to the legislature took that out in the bond funding that came out a couple of years ago so we still struggle with this piece and sometimes NRCS is able to do it in like a camp situation where you have a bunch of camp roads owners who all pay into one but it is trickier it is trickier with a group like that it is something that we have been working on as an advocacy organization going to the legislature looking at bond funding and other funding sources we're hoping that possibly with the climate action plan you know stream smart fits right into everything that is being talked about in the climate action plan with climate change in these larger storms and the need to rebuild our infrastructure in the face of climate change but we're not quite sure yet and if there are places that we can use advocacy we may reach out to folks to ask for you to lend your voices as we push for some sort of funding program for that I don't know if other folks know of other programs other than small isolated local projects that have been funded I'll just add if the site happens to be a priority area from a state agency's fisheries perspective whether we're talking DMR or IF&W we sometimes have the ability to help sponsor or support a proposal to a variety of habitat restoration grant programs that there's a whole slew of them that potentially exist out there not all of them were listed on some of the slides in the presentations earlier today but we know about those opportunities and if it happens to be a priority area even if it's a private crossing such as a driveway or camp road we may often be able to help there's still a time lag when you're talking about soliciting external or grant funding but just be aware of that but there's also additional opportunities where private crossings are eligible and if I could add also I have a great goal and that is that maybe we will be able to expand the state bond so the DEP is able to offer money to private mentors because there's a real need I see it everywhere we see it in the questions today it's a real need but I would also offer that I've seen so many situations as fearful as people are about the added cost that sometimes comes from StreamSmart that there are towns there are private individuals doing crossings with help from some of us here and others at a much more reasonable rate you know it's really not about the StreamSmart elements it's about what some of your standards are who's doing the work sometimes it takes a little creativity but there are towns and individuals out there doing stuff in a really affordable level to StreamSmart standards and so I just don't want to lose track of that it is not all out of range for any normal road association necessarily to do and one other thing I just want to add about private crossings especially if it's a smaller scale low volume type road is the engineering standards are not as stringent as like a busy road and a town road so there are alternative technologies or designs that you can often get away with that are much cheaper in the big in the grand scheme of things Those are two excellent points cost and funding is always tricky and we're always working to try and get that to be less of a hurdle for folks there was a good question about not just thinking about one crossing at a time but how do we think about designing for a system when we have multiple crossings maybe impoundments all associated within the same watershed where do we go for assistance on that sort of design and what sorts of things should we be thinking about that might be different from when we're just thinking one crossing at a time I don't know if Mary or Alex wants to join in I'll be happy to join in I mean certainly we do a lot of this thinking often it's really up to the person people involved at the local level whether it's town officials or these are private folks involved in land trust it can take so many different forms but we most of us are looking at this from a systemic standpoint and so we love it when folks want to consider things at a broader scale and then we can start to sort of slice and dice and think about what the priority should be in terms of which site first when we're talking about sea-run fish if you own or control a crossing in that stream network it is the barrier stopping sea-run fish we're often going to be saying yes let's get that one first and then we can proceed in a stepwise manner perhaps upstream to help sea-run fish but on the opposite end of the spectrum as for so many sites in Maine that have great brook trout it may not be about getting sea-run fish up it's about expanding the network and so the individual crossing that can get to the most good habitat to expand that inner stream network that's where we're first but we're always going to be thinking in sequence about the other options involvement so we're I'm very happy and I know probably Mary as other folks are very happy to talk to people about that approach. Yeah this is Colin you know Lucian and I as regulators we'll be in the field and now you know we get the opposite of the system approach which is well the downstream culverts too small and the downstream culverts hung so why should we be doing anything at this culvert anything special and you know basically that the company line is someone has to go first. That's great Colin thanks and I know that that next big RCPP that's being proposed by the Nature Conservancy and others is I believe part of the the idea behind it is to think in watersheds or sub watersheds to really get connectivity that that's meaningful at that scale and I also wanted to throw in another plug for resource that we haven't thrown in here yet but you've seen a snapshot of it is the stream habitat viewer this is an online map resource there's a link to it from streamsmartmain.org which you can also get through to through main Audubon's website it has all the locations of all the public crossings 90% of them or so all across the state categorizes to whether their barriers potential barriers are not barriers for fish passage and there's a ton of information on other aquatic resources that are there that can help you bring the story to get financial aid or go to the resource agencies to get assistance on some of these and help you plan as a town or someone who's responsible for a sub watershed to really think about where to start yeah Alex can I add to that Sarah a little bit just the stream habitat viewer is a great site I don't say that just because I'm involved with it but it also sometimes misses I just got a call from a road commissioner the other days and you know we're not we're not in there we don't well the crossing may be in there but we can't see the habitat that we're talking about and so I just I want to reiterate something that was said earlier you really need to reach out to the regional biologists for inland fishers and wildlife and or main department of marine resources because they have just immense wealth of knowledge personally about the resources of habitat and fish information so it may not appear on the map that there's habitat but you can often find that information from those biologists and that can then be used in grant applications such as for DEP just as validly as if it appears on that map I'll actually add there if I can with the multiple projects it can we haven't seen it a lot but there have been some folks that have touted sort of relationships with the towns because some of these you know span across towns if you can communicate with the towns or where you know look where that stream goes to see if another municipality might be interested in putting in for a grant on theirs and if there's a sort of synergy or some combined improvements that you can tout that you know as a little bit of a tip will help you out on the funding side that it's it's not just this one that it's potentially a series or you're going to get some other efficiencies out of it as well as from you know only mobilizing once or something like that that's a great reminder thanks John we are getting close to our drop dead time it is 1153 so I don't know if we don't have too many questions still in the box here if folks want to continue the discussion Hannah can put a link into I guess Hannah just emailed it to folks can we put it in the all panelists have it in their emails and then I will place it in the chat just a reminder the folks that as we transition from this zoom to the next zoom it will be a few minutes so just hang tight not get if you can't get the link you can also send me an email and I'll put my email in the chat box as well excellent thank you Hannah and again I think we've we just have a couple more questions in the box and maybe we can go through for a few more minutes before folks jump over and I don't know who wants to take this one maybe Mary out there over at you but maybe some of the regulators want to jump in the question is are there large industrial road slash dams being removed in the future to allow salmon to get reestablished and I just wanted to throw that out there as another piece to talk about culverts are a huge thing but dams are a big a big piece to and and kind of like the question about multiple culverts dams and culverts together cause cause problems I don't know if you want to jump in Mary your dams are a bit of a different issue than culverts because of their size and generally the functions and they're you know the length of time that they've been on the landscape it's a totally different process that we do have to go to but go through there are dams and various structures are regulated in different ways depending on the service that they're providing on the landscape so there are different kind of processes and in many cases stakeholders or players involved with those discussions there is dam removal dam breach are always possibilities however it's a totally different process with different potential outcomes and also the reasons for dams on the landscape very dramatically and significantly across the state of Maine so although we're always open to suggestion on dam removal and I will say that there are a lot of legacy structures out of the landscape in some cases they're not even known about until you around the stream then and there you see an old log driving dam or something and sometimes they're fully intact and have been there for decades and we've all forgotten about it those structures tend to be a little easier to tackle and deal with versus the big dams like on the main stem rivers it's just a different kind of process and in a system that we have to work through. Thanks Mary and me or Wendy did you want to jump in on that one or? Yeah so dam removal and dam breaches or dam modifications and fish passages is an ongoing part of Atlantic salmon recovery efforts so yeah pretty much every year there's at least one or two dams coming out somewhere in Maine that's primarily related to restoration of Atlantic salmon and for instance this year the temple stream dam in the town of Farmington is coming out which will be a huge boost to restoration of Atlantic salmon and other native fish in that section of the sandy river so yeah there's quite a concerted effort on dam removals fish passage dam modifications related to Atlantic salmon recovery in Maine. Great thank you and me and maybe we just have a couple minutes before we're all kicked off and can jump into the next meeting but maybe I'll come back to you Mary there was a question earlier are these stream smart projects being monitored to just to determine what's happening with fish and wildlife after they're put in. Some are the reality is as fish biologists as wildlife biologists this is an action that we already know benefits the populations that we're trying to help so looking at improving aquatic connectivity and riverine systems has been a hot topic in research for decades now in the fisheries biology and science these are actions that we know enhance and facilitate populations and as practitioners actively working at culvert replacement sites soon as you pull those coffer dams and get your natural flow going back through a system the fish are zipping right back in there and often continuing right on upstream we've seen this happen but some high priority sites that are sometimes testing new technologies and new methods we do have a miniscule monitoring program and I would say at least from the perspective of inland fishing wildlife for sites that are being replaced in priority and known wild brook trout areas after construction is completed we usually do go back out to the site and just verify that the replacement happened to design specs and meeting standards and criteria and permitting requirements so we do visually inspect almost all of our sites within brook trout country thanks Mary Alex do you want to jump on really quickly I know we're about out of time but yeah Nature Conservancy has devoted quite a bit of energy into surveying a number of sites not for the fish counts necessarily because that does get more complex and difficult but to make sure truly not just as built exactly but to look over time and see how the stream has changed in relation to that stream smart crossing and they're building up essentially a data set of a number of crossings looked at over the years which is really useful and I can't say it's a big surprise it looks like everything is working beautifully yep thank you that is fantastic and before we get kicked off this platform and I'd love to see everybody in the the other zoom meeting I want to thank you all for coming we had over we had nearly 160 folks here today talking about stream smarts that is records for sure and apologies for any of the quality challenges that we had and thank you to all the panelists who came because this was I asked a lot of you and I said hey turn it all on its head what you've done before and you all did it and I really really appreciate it