This summer, Trout Unlimited employed two seasonal technicians to collect culvert and bridge inventory data in Dane County, Wisc.
This inventory is part of our larger effort to better understand the extent of habitat fragmentation across the Driftless Area and ensure that we have sufficient information about outdated infrastructure to have ready solutions when it is time for replacement or repair work. TU will be relying on this information in the coming years as we consider projects to address fish-blocking infrastructure at road-stream crossings.
My grandfather used to say “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right” to me and my cousins any time we were helping with a project, whether it was painting a fence or maintaining a used tool. It is an appropriate adage when dealing with infrastructure decisions, too.
If a town or county is going to the trouble of replacing a culvert or bridge, it’s worth the effort to ensure that the replacement is the right size, installed correctly and is built to last. This makes sense to taxpayers, too.
Unfortunately, the pressures of project cost, timing, convenience and regulations can create a setting where getting it done quickly and cheaply ends up overrunning the plan to do it right.
Just like the kid who wants to get the job done quickly and move on to other fun, a town project might end up settling for “Ah, good enough for government work” when it should be managed in a way that capitalizes on the once-in-50-or-100-year opportunity to do the job right.
Our road stream crossing data collects the necessary measurements to identify and classify problematic infrastructure.
A good inventory not only identifies basic needs, but it also gets ahead of problems by categorizing infrastructure by urgency, severity and issue types so that the most pressing needs can be addressed while strategies for mid- and long-term solutions can be created.