Bells Lake Road - Culverts part 2 or 3

Well I went and had a look at the culverts recently installed that I mentioned in a recent post. Here I thought that they had removed the old ones and installed 2 new ones! Why they would do that in the first place was a bit of a mystery to me. However I was not disappointed? They actually added 2 more culverts. That makes 4 to handle spring time run off during a 2 week period. See below:
You will note in the above picture the 4 culverts. This picture is taken on the exit side and you will note that the marked culvert actually runs up hill. I wonder if this is an engineering feature. I also wonder if the maintenance folks mistook the direction of flow. You will note that his area is well cleared. Now take a look at the entrance side of the road.


The normal procedure in road construction is that a catchment basin is dug in this area. Now I sure everyone knows why?
1. It gives the water a place to gather where it will eventually rise and begin to flow through the culverts. A natural flow control if you will. Come on folks this is not rocket science.
2. A catchment basin also is a place where flotsam will gather which can be cleaned out easily.


As you can see here, there should be some trouble this spring

This must also be an engineering feature. Place the culvert up high enough and it should take only a little water.

I had a look at the old culverts and they both had mud in them. In short they did not appear to have been cleaned out.

Now all this leads to several questions:

1. Was this installation engineered:
2. Why did they not pull the 2 old culverts out and replace them with a larger single culvert with a welded wire screen at the inlet
end. They could have reused the old culverts and still have 2 nice new shinny ones left to use.
3. Does anyone know what the average flow rate is during flooding. This would determine the size of culvert needed!
4. What is the size of the catchment area. This information would also help to determine what size of culvert would be needed.

I suppose we should be thankful that this was done. Only the coming spring run off will determine if it was done right.

Our tax dollars at work. In these severe economic times it is comforting to know that a great deal of thought is going into the maintenance of our roads.

More to come. It's a never ending source of discussion.