 Good morning everyone, we're just going to let everybody in for a few minutes and then we'll get started. All right, folks, I'm going to launch a quick poll here and this is just a couple questions. We'd love to know whether you've attended one of these trainings before and who you're representing. So I'm going to launch that. It'll be up for a couple of minutes. If you can go ahead and fill that out. Great. We are at 92% participated. Thank you everyone for filling that out. All right, and I think we're going to get started with Sarah Haggerty. Good morning. Thank you all. I'm going to apologize in advance. I had to move at the last minute. We had some technical problems, so hopefully it won't be too noisy. But welcome and thank you all for coming today. I'm Sarah Haggerty. I'm a conservation biologist with Maine Audubon. I want to run through the usual sort of zoom protocols. We are in a webinar format, so you don't have access to audio and video. But we do want to hear from you. So we would ask that you use the Q&A function for questions. You can put them in there throughout the talk, the talks going on today. We will have special sections for questions. We will keep an eye on what's coming in. If you have technical issues, please use the chat. I have Hannah Young, who just you just saw as my tech guru today. We will send around evaluation forums after the webinar today. And we'll include a link to additional materials afterwards. You don't need to worry about any of that. Just sit back and enjoy. There will be a break around 10, sort of halfway through for about 10 minutes. And we will run today from 8.30 to 12.30. So I'm going to get started. Share my screen properly. Am I in slideshow now? Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So as I mentioned, I'm with May Nottobon. We are the coordinator for the StreamSmart program. And if you're not familiar with us, we are a nonprofit conservation organization. And our mission is to conserve man's wildlife and wildlife habitats by engaging with the public of all ages through outreach, education and action. And today we're going to be talking about roadstream crossings and the StreamSmart program, which is a program that was that was developed based on the US Forest Service Stream Simulation Design Program. We've tried to distill it down to a number of principles. And while we're the coordinator for the program, we are not the whole program. And I want to thank all of the partners who are here today. We have some individuals and I want to thank the individuals and the organizations who are working with us today to put on the workshop, but also all of the groups that work behind the scenes to make StreamSmart happen year round and all over the state. I want to run through a quick agenda for the day. We're going to start with a conversation on the ecological value of free-flowing streams and StreamSmart crossings. And then we're going to go into a in-depth session on, I shouldn't say in-depth, varied session on legal requirements. I have six different regulators here and you're going to hear from all of them. It's really an introduction to the regulations that might apply to your situation. We're going to take a break at about 10 for about 10 minutes. And then we will have a video of the stream table. If you have been to a StreamSmart workshop before, you may have seen this in person. We've adapted it for for COVID and for this online venue. And then we will have a place for for questions at the end of that video. And then we're really going to dive into the technical aspects of how we build StreamSmart crossings. We're going to wrap up at the end talking about money and costs and some financial opportunities to help you defray the costs of StreamSmart crossings. And then we have a good chunk of time, a good half hour, maybe more depending on how the rest of the day goes for questions and answers and discussion and all of our presenters are going to stick around for the end. So again, there will be places for questions throughout the morning. But then at the end, we will have a lot of a lot more time for questions and discussions. So now I am going to turn this over to Nick Kallis, who is an assistant regional fisheries biologist with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. And I'm going to stop sharing and I'm going to let Nick share from his screen. So it looks like it's working for everybody. Can you hear me? Good. All right. Well, I'm just going to dive in then. Let me know if there's any weird technical difficulties that pop up that seems inevitable in these types of situations. But yeah, I'm glad to be here today. I'm glad everyone else is here too. And I think this is a really important topic, StreamSmart crossings. It's something that as a fisheries biologist, I actually do deal with quite a bit. We're lucky enough to be able to comment on a lot of different development and environmental review type projects around the state. And many of them come down to what's the quality of this crossing over a specific stream. So it really is something that I think can have tremendous value and can really make a difference out in the environment. So I am going to just repeat this a few times. I think throughout the talk, which is just that StreamSmart crossings primarily exists to maintain fish and wildlife habitat while simultaneously protecting roads and public safety. But a good place to start is kind of what not to do and what we're trying to avoid. And also it's always pretty instructive to have pictures of these catastrophic failures. So for instance, this top picture here was actually just taken last year down east. I think Winter Harbor, fairly good sized road, completely washed out. And the bottom picture was up in Northern Somerset County a few years ago, slightly smaller road, but obviously not immune to the same catastrophic failure that we're seeing here. And it probably goes without saying that these types of failures are bad for fish, bad for wildlife, bad for budgets, and certainly bad for public safety. But it's not all doom and gloom. There's a lot of benefits that we could talk about too, specifically with free flowing streams, which is what a StreamSmart crossing aims to provide. I'll start kind of just with the human dimensions of that kind of thing. So as a fisheries biologist, angling is pretty important to what I do. There's almost a quarter of a million anglers in the state of Maine, which if you think about the amount of Maine residents, there's that's a pretty healthy chunk of people that get out and fish annually. We also sell upwards of 80,000 non-resident fishing licenses every single year. So it really is an incredibly popular outdoor sport, apparently, second only to running in the country. It's easy to get into. There's a pretty low barrier to entry, but one thing that you often do require is a good place to fish, like a free flowing stream. Luckily, Maine does have world-class fisheries. A lot of people point to our brook trout fisheries in particular. There's a little blurb there about heritage brook trout waters. All that means is it's usually a pond that has not been stocked either ever, or at least not in the last 25 years and has self-sustaining wild populations of brook trout. And I'll get into that a little bit more, but it's a really important resource that's really not found anywhere else in the country. To throw a few other numbers at you, the benefits that angling and free flowing streams provide to the state totaled nearly $100 million annually in wages and salaries, $200 million in retail sales, and over $20 million in tax revenues, not to mention over 3,000 jobs, including mine. To stick with the human element for a bit, though, I think it's important to remember that there's a lot more value that free flowing streams provide beyond just economics. And that started with the very first people that ever lived in Maine, and that's the Wabanaki people. Fishing and the value that free flowing streams provided to them was absolutely essential, not only to their culture, but to their entire survival. The names of streams and the places that the Wabanaki lived were so important that family bans were often named and identified with these places to which they belong. The Wabanaki also have a pretty impressive history, actually, of advocating for free flowing streams and the things that were clearly incredibly important to them. As far back as the 1700s, there's documented cases of them protesting illegal dams, like on the Przomskut River. And they've been instrumental in working to restore many free flowing streams, including the largest river in the state and offside. And it really all comes down to the fact that water and fish are sacred to the Wabanaki people, and I think that's an incredible way to come at this whole topic. So then to move from the human element to the fish and wildlife part of things, this is kind of my bread and butter here. Maine is really the last best place for wild eastern brook trout in the entire country. The map on the left shows the whole range of brook trout. They come in the eastern United States, and the risk that the various habitats that they live in might be to being degraded. So like a purple and a blue, which is most of Maine, it's pretty good. The risk of habitat degradation is pretty low, whereas some more populous areas, New York, along the coast, there's a lot more degradation. But it is important to note that even in Maine, we're not immune to this habitat loss. And a lot of that comes down to fragmentation. So a stream that once flowed many miles is broken into by a road crossing that doesn't allow connectivity. And if you look at the map on the right, I mean, you can see that brook trout really are able to inhabit almost the entire state, and any of those blue chunks is a spot where a wild brook trout very likely exists without the presence of competing non-native salmon. It's like rainbow trout or brown trout, something like that. So again, although Maine has pretty pristine habitat relative to a lot of places, and we have a lot of it, it's really important to make sure that we protect it and even enhance and try to fix some of the degradation that we've already had. Of course, that's not just about brook trout. Atlantic salmon are another incredibly important dish to the state of Maine. On the left, there's a map of the historic salmon watersheds in the northeastern United States. And unfortunately today, Maine is really the only place where you can still find Atlantic salmon. And to be honest, it's probably the only place where there's any real hope of restoring Atlantic salmon at least at this point in time. Maine contains an endangered, they call it a distinct population segment of Atlantic salmon. And that's kind of what that pink map on the right shows. And although all of that is potential salmon habitat, maybe all of that's not accessible because of poor stream crossings and fragmentation. And if restoration is to be successful, that really cannot be a barrier either literally or figuratively to salmon being able to get back to these streams that they need to spawn every year. And the reason that connectivity is so important for a salmon, for a brook trout, for any fish is just that fish really need to move. This, I think this map was showing potential Atlantic salmon habitat throughout not just a year, but really the entire lifetime of the fish. If you look at all the different labels, maybe salmon hatch in this little nursery habitat area, and then they move to forage as they get a little older. And then it's summertime and it's really warm, so they move to deep water habitat or cold water refuges, stuff like that. And then in the fall, when they're adults, they'll move back to different habitat to spawn and reproduce and continue the whole cycle. And if any part of that is interrupted, then their chance of survival and being able to further their population long term has probably decreased. Just a couple other examples, because I think it's pretty impressive the amount that fish can move and also the amount that fish need to move. The map on the left is a brook trout that was tagged on the Magaloway River up in Northwest Maine in the Western Mountains. And if you follow the numbers sequentially from one up to, I think it goes to about 49, basically it's just showing throughout the year, 2010, 2011, a brook trout was tagged and it moved up and down and back and forth and all around, depending on what it needed to achieve at that point in time, whether it was habitat to get through the hot summer, bonning habitat, even habitat to overwinter when things get pretty harsh. And this single trout ended up moving over 75 miles, which is incredible, really. And again, another example for salmon, this time we'll talk landlock salmon. So this is something that's in my fisheries management region and I deal with quite a bit. Tobago Lake has one of the original four native landlock salmon populations in the state and the primary spawning tributary for these fish that they need to reproduce is the Perkwood River. It runs over 60 miles from Tobago Lake all the way up to Albany, almost to Songo Pond, and salmon utilized honestly almost every inch of it. It's amazing how even in a little trickle, salmon might be up there trying to spawn. And this is actually a good success story too, because for centuries, the Perkwood River was fragmented and blocked with dams and also bad crossings and things like that. Over a period of decades, the department and many other partners, including NGOs, towns, just local communities came together, really removed some dams, restored a lot of crossings, made them much more stream smart. And now salmon are able to access that almost the entire river to the point that they are basically able to sustain the entire fishery in the second largest lake in the state with wild reproduction. So it used to be you had to stock salmon, get them to survive. Now about 75 to 80% of the fish in that lake are wild, which is great. It's really kind of like I said, a success type story, but it's dependent on their ability to move. And I could talk about fish all day, but there are other organisms that are pretty important too, and that also depend on streams being able to be free flowing and act like a stream. So things that fish might eat, for instance, like macroinvertebrates are a certain example. Freshwater mussels certainly are important in streams. They'll filter water. They're an important part of the environment. They provide food for other things like mammals, which will also eat fish. And then of course, you have reptiles and amphibians and all sorts of other creatures too. So really streams and the free flowing aspect of streams is important to maintaining all of these different classes of organisms, not to mention streams and properly designed crossings provide corridors for a lot of these species to move. So unfortunately, we have a picture of a turtle that had to cross the road, likely because there wasn't a crossing on whatever water body it was living in. So kind of had to go up, cross the road. And as we all know, turtles don't necessarily do very well on a road type environment. So allowing them to move in a safer way and not just turtles, but everything is also an important aspect of stream smart crossings. There we go. Because I mean, in a nutshell, I guess I would say regulation is a big part of what a stream does. It regulates the movement of fish and wildlife, but it also regulates the flow of water. Streams are really important for attenuating floods and controlling when there's a big storm event, things like that. Streams also maintain water temperature. They keep the water at a range that a lot of the fish and wildlife are adapted to survive that. And I think it's pretty instructive too, if I'm sure many of you can imagine going for a hike on a hot day, you're in the woods, and then suddenly you get to a stream and the temperature just drops. You can just feel the cooler water and the temperature that a free flowing stream is able to maintain. And then of course streams further provide a little regulation for the environment through movement of organisms and materials. So we're talking nutrients, you know, woody debris, and then of course the fish and wildlife that live in and around a stream. So all of these are kind of important aspects that, you know, again stream smart crossings and free flowing stream help provide. It's probably also important to remember that, you know, some of these examples like the Crooked River, it's a pretty big river and certainly there are many other larger ones in the state. But small streams are incredibly vital to this whole process too. And certainly just certainly just as worthy of having a stream smart crossing. Smaller streams often have higher densities of some of these fish we've talked about like brook trout and salmon, particularly at certain times of year. Small streams are often key spawning habitat for these species. So they might have a lot more sort of juvenile fish or you know, even eggs overwintering in some of these places. And although big rivers carry a lot of water, there are so many small streams in the state that when you think about it from a cumulative perspective, small streams really kind of make up honestly the bulk of the habitat in a stream environment, you know, that we have in Maine. So certainly worthy of just as much protection. Okay, so that's kind of a lot of the good stuff about what streams can provide. So it's kind of moved to the problem, which is that most stream crossings are actually barriers. That's not unique to Maine, but we certainly have our share of them too. A couple of these pictures, the middle and the right specifically, you know, are focusing on culverts. And I'll do a fair amount of talk about culverts there. I would say kind of the poster child for problem stream crossings here and everywhere else. And we'll get into some of some of the ways that they, you know, cause these specific issues. But it's important to recognize that many of these culverts were put in place really just to move water. That was sort of we have a problem we have to move water and build a road. And, you know, a lot of these other things, unfortunately in the past weren't considered. And culverts also have a long lifespan, you know, many can last decades, some of the new ones can last almost 100 years if everything goes right. So it's important to get it right when these things are involved. So crossing those barriers is a problem. And part of the reason it's a problem is because it's so widespread. Even though we talked about, you know, the relative pristine quality of habitat in Maine, we still have more than our fair share of problem crossings as well. This map shows barriers on a lot of state and town and some private roads. But it also doesn't even account for many private crossings that aren't documented right here. But even discounting the potential for more private crossings that we don't know about this, there's at least 7,000 severe barriers to connectivity and fish movement and free flowing streams throughout the state. In addition to those 7,000 severe barriers, there's probably an additional 8,000 or more potential or partial barriers. So these might be barriers that could become a problem in the future or barriers that seasonally, say during low flows, may not allow for fish to pass something like that. So anyway, when you add up the 7,000 and the 8,000, that's, you know, 15,000 or so known barriers or potential barriers in just in this state. And if each one on average blocks about a mile of stream habitat, which I believe is what the math works out to, you know, you're talking maybe upwards of 15,000 miles of blocked stream habitat, which is a pretty massive number. So it's a problem. How is there a problem? Again, there's a lot of different bad crossings out there, unfortunately, and I've certainly seen my share. But culverts are one of the worst, especially when they're poorly designed. And they tend to block fish passage in three major ways, sometimes a combination of any of these three. So one, they can be a velocity barrier, meaning the flows are just too fast going through a culvert. The water could be too shallow going through a culvert. You know, if the water is, you know, barely, I don't know, a centimeter deep and you have a larger fish trying to swim through there, there's just nothing to swim through. So that's a potential barrier. And then if a culvert has a drop again, if it's what we call perched, then fish may not be able to get back into it. If the jump is too high, fish can't get in. Additionally, these perched culverts tend to have little, you know, they'll tend to blow out kind of the water or the stream environment on the bottom end. And fish may not have like pool they need. So fish kind of have like, they need kind of like a running start, I guess you could think of it as where they need a little pool to swim up and then jump up into in order to make it into these perched culverts. And if those are gone or limited, that that's certainly going to block fish passage. And, you know, maybe that applies to all fish, maybe it applies just to the smaller species or for juvenile fish. So it's important to recognize that, you know, culverts and poor design of them can block, you know, fish and other species from moving at different times and in different ways and for different species. So it's really, you can really get into it. But in any case, moved to some examples here. So let's just kind of go through all three again with these pictures. The top picture on the left is a still shot, but it looks fast to me. And it's clearly just too fast for a fish to make it through. There's nowhere to rest. And it's just, you know, it'd be like walking straight into a hurricane. And a lot of times what a culvert will do when it's undersized and many of them are is it kind of acts like a funnel. So we have all this upstream water getting channelized into this really small culvert. And then it just blasts through and fish can't quite make it. And that's often related to the bottom left picture, which is a perch culvert. So a lot of times when these culverts are undersized, the water will blast through at such velocity, you know, that it will actually scour out and just, you know, push downstream all the substrate and all the stream bottom that existed at the base of the culvert. You know, I see many, many perch culverts in the environment out there. And the vast majority of them were not perched and did not have a drop when they were installed. But poor planning and, you know, undersized culverts and not really thinking about the consequences led to, you know, suddenly, like in this picture on the bottom left, maybe that's a two foot drop. I mean, that's that's certainly going to be a barrier to basically everything moving through that. So if we move to the top right, again, we talked about how if the flow is too shallow, things like fish can't get through that culvert, you know, it's certainly bigger than some of these small pipes, but it's flat and it's wide and it doesn't create any sort of channel that a fish might be able to utilize. You just have this sort of really shallow a lot of times they'll call it sheet flow. And it's certainly going to present a barrier, especially at certain times of the year. I mean, maybe in the springtime, that crossing looked okay. But during the low flows of the summer, you might have not enough flow coming through, you might have an issue in that sense. And then just, you know, as we talked about a combination of, you know, small crossings with too much flow at sometimes the year too little flow at other times of the year. And that drop is a classic combination. Unfortunately, we see too often. On top of these, these three main ways that culverts will block fish passage, there's a couple other physical barriers that are probably worth mentioning. So if a culvert is installed and it's too small, a lot of times that will be covered up with debris in that top right picture. You know, I can't even see the culvert. I think there's one in there, but it's completely blocked with sticks and logs and leaves and everything else. So a fish obviously can't make it through that. And in a related way, if a culvert is blocked like that or if it's set too high and the water gets ponded up behind it, which you kind of see in that bottom left picture, another barrier that can exist to fish movement is something that we'll call a thermal dam. So you have a fish like a brook trout or an Atlantic salmon, something that needs colder water, it might be able to actually pass through the culvert. But if it reaches this dammed up section of, you know, stopped flowing stream above it, that might be heated up and it might actually be so warm that the fish is not going to be able to pass through it. And, you know, you can kind of demonstrate the importance of that on the slide here. What this is looking at is the way that a temperature in a free flowing stream and an impounded stream, like one with a thermal dam changes throughout the year. So this covers, it looks like about Memorial Day through September. And the blue line is a free flowing stream, the red line is an impounded stream with that type of thermal dam. A couple of things to notice, the green straight line coming across is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above that is going to cause problems for those cold water fish species like trout, like salmon. They're not going to be able to grow as well. And survival could be impacted. And then we have this purple line higher up at 75 degrees. And anything above that, you know, fish are, these cold water fish are not even going to be able to feed. It's just so warm that they're at real risk for mortality at that point. So it's probably pretty obvious you want to limit the amount of time that a stream kind of in these problem ranges temperature-wise. And really what this graph is showing is just that in the free flowing stream, the blue line, yes, it may dip up into that kind of impaired range, but it's for a short time. You know, it's maybe a month or so. And fish are pretty good at avoiding things for a little while, if they can. But if you look at the impounded stream, you know, you're talking three months or more, that fish growth might be impaired, along with maybe a month in the middle where fish might just die. And I think it just goes to show pretty clearly that a free flowing stream provides such a better environment for the survival and growth and reproduction of a lot of these colder water fish species that Maine is well known for. A couple of other issues to touch on before we move on from culverts too. There was someone came up with this great idea a while ago that, oh, this one culvert is too small and it's not passing enough water. So let's add in another one or a third or even a fourth culvert. Same crossing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen multiple culverts that are crossing it. It always looks bad and they never work. You know, what happens is when the flow is too low, it gets spread out between all these culverts and it's individually too low in each and every one of them and nothing can get. Now when the flow is high, all of these have water just blasting out of them. It's like four fire hoses blocking fish from moving up the stream too. They rarely work well and one single larger well designed crossing would have been so much more effective in a situation like this. The other thing that we often see is particularly as older culverts, maybe a steel metal culvert begins to age and rust and degrade. It needs to be replaced and that is fair, but something that again someone came up with was, hey, we have this existing pipe and maybe we can just shove a cheap plastic pipe right through it and then we don't have to deal with road fill and everything like that. The problem is these plastic pipes, when you put one through an existing culvert, it's called slip lining or related to invert lining. A lot of times people will use these smoothbore plastic pipes which is what this picture on the bottom right shows and they have absolutely no friction in them so the water just shoots right through and they many, many times create passage problems for fish. That's actually one of the things we try to key in on when we're doing our environmental reviews. If somebody wants to use a smoothbore pipe and a crossing, we're likely not going to be very supportive of that and we'll try to steer them away from that if there's any way we can possibly do it because they certainly present a potential barrier. I am a freshwater biologist but it's important to remember that these problems and these barriers do not just exist on freshwater. They can certainly impact tidal crossings as well and sometimes they can impact water as it flows in on a high tide or a flood tide. If you think about a salt marsh environment, everything above the road is going to be dependent on the tide coming in, flushing it with salt water, keeping everything wet and sustaining the marsh. If the crossing on the road is poorly designed, say undersized or doesn't pass enough water, then that salt marsh may begin to shrink upstream. Salt marshes are home to a variety of really unique species that are important to conserve, but even beyond that, as the marsh shrinks, it tends to present an opportunity for invasive species to show up. A common reed is a big one that you see everywhere that takes advantage of these changing marsh environments. Beyond just the environmental impact, again, there's a pretty clear human impact to our development as well when tidal crossings are poorly designed. In Maine, this has been going on for quite a while, but sea levels have been rising faster in Maine than many other places around the world and they're likely going to continue to rise. If a tidal crossing is not designed well enough to pass this increased flow of expected water, you can see things like this situation on the right, where tidal roads are flooded and homes can be destroyed and everything like that. It's pretty important stuff. I'll also just put in a quick plug here. If you think about stream smart crossing specifically on a tidal road situation, that might be something that was covered under a new program coming soon called coast-wise. It's really just making sure that tidal road crossings are able to function in a stream smart way past fish, wildlife, and also the necessary quantities of water. Just keep an eye out for that one. A little plug there. Along with sea level rise, we'll talk about some of the other impacts that climate change can have to road infrastructure. You have water coming up from the sea level, rise part of things, but you also have more water coming down the stream as bigger storms are likely to become more frequent and more severe. There was one study. This is looking specifically at Maine actually in the future. Maine is likely to have a 74% increase in the frequency of these really extreme storm events as well as a concurrent 23% increase in the size of these storms. There's just a lot more water and a lot more stress coming down and having to make it through all these crossings. When they're not designed well, kind of this happened. This was a stream crossing in Freeport. This was in 2008, I think, and it's not good. The culvert was blocked or not sufficient to pass that massive quantity of water and the water found away. They went around it and through it. There goes the road. And then at the end there, that's the culvert itself rearing up and being washed downstream, thrown away, ending up, who knows where, the aftermath. And you can only imagine the amount of sediment and debris that was washed down and you're talking about a failure like that. That's a pretty extreme situation and obviously it's bad for any budget, but it can also occur on a smaller scale. This is just another example of how road failure can have a pretty strong economic impact. This was actually in Acadia, which we, most of us think of as one of the best environments in Maine. One of the most preserved, certainly. There was an undersized culvert on a road crossing and there was a big storm. The water, just like in the Freeport situation, went around it, went kind of through it and washed out the road downstream. The cost to replace the road was something north of $20,000 at that time. I'm sure it'd be even more today. The kicker here is that despite all of that effort that went into it, the undersized culvert is actually still there. It didn't wash out like the Freeport crossing. The water just went around it and blew out the road. But instead of replacing problem, which was the undersized culvert, the powers that be decided that will just replace the road and deal with it later. The issue with that, of course, is that what's to stop it from happening again? If streams are likely to become more frequent and more severe, it's probable that this road could wash away again if the undersized culvert is still there. They spent all this money, $20,000 plus to replace the road, but they might have to do that again and again when you could have replaced the actual problem crossing with, say, a nice open bottom, natural bottom arch that was sufficiently wide. Maybe you could have done that for $25,000, $30,000. Essentially, any time you replaced this road once, twice, three times, you spent far more than you need to. That kind of long-term perspective is pretty important when budgeting for stream smart crossings. Again, beyond the economic sense, failures of crossings are pretty bad for habitat. This can occur across a range of scales. Obviously, a catastrophic failure like the Freeport crossing video there, horrible for habitat, tons of sediment washed downstream, but even when a culvert doesn't work as it's supposed to or any crossing, even when there's small amounts of road fill that enter the stream every year, that can have a real measurable impact. Fine sediment is one of the first things that will enter a stream and have this negative impact. It can suffocate fish eggs that are incubating often over winter. It can fill in gaps between rocks and destroy the habitat for not only these eggs, but also the larval fish and the invertebrates that these fish depend on. Also, if that rocky habitat can get filled in, maybe that was spawning habitat for an adult salmon. Now it has nowhere to go and it can't quite reproduce. It's also important to think about the scale temporally that sediment can impact a stream. It might seem like sediments dumped in a stream. It washes down and that's that, but in reality it can last quite a long time and have real measurable impacts, negative impacts on a stream for potentially a decade or more. I know there was one study looking at how long it took sediment to move down a stream just the distance of one mile, which is really not that far. I think on average it took seven to ten years, so I'm sure there are situations where it could take longer than that. If a stream is impacted for seven to ten years, every time sediment enters it, that's pretty bad for habitat and everything that depends on it. That's a lot of the bad. Let's move to some of the good. Luckily there are solutions and that's why we're all here, which is stream smart crossing, which again are there primarily to maintain fish of wildlife habitat while protecting roads and public safety. They also again crossing like this would be able to pass kind of those higher flows that we might expect in the future from storms and floods and everything like that. I'll go into a few examples of not only what failure looks like, but what a solution looks like as well that would correspond to that failure. This was the Machias River in 2010. There was a very large storm. I think flows down the river ended up 20 times higher than normal, pretty massive, and it took this 12-foot diameter culvert and just ripped it out, tossed it downstream. You can see it's twisted and the power of water is pretty astonishing, but nearby there was a recently installed crossing just before the storm following these stream smart principles. It did just fine. I mean it's passing a massive amount of water, but it survived. It was stable and it didn't ruin that stretch of the stream for a long time afterward. It really did a great job. I'm sure many of you remember Hurricane Irene and this was about 2011 and some of the impacts that it had if you look say in Vermont. Over a thousand culverts and bridges were damaged or destroyed and over $700 million in damage was caused. The one place that these culverts were not as impacted was in the Green Mountain National Forest where a lot of culverts were recently resized again following these stream smart principles a little bit before the hurricane came through and actually not a single culvert in the National Forest was lost over there versus a thousand throughout the rest of the state. So I think that's pretty impressive in a testament to the quality that a well-designed crossing can bring. Another aspect of stream smart solutions is realizing that they can occur across multiple scales of roads too. So you know this would be a larger example. This is a state highway. I think these before pictures and the pictures of during Hurricane Irene were up in the Karabasset Valley here in Maine and this was a DOT road, a state highway. There were a couple culverts that completely washed out in the bottom left there and they were both replaced with a really nice well-designed bridge span much more likely to sustain itself through large storm events not just tropical type storms like hurricanes but you know just the larger storms that were more likely to see on a more regular basis going forward. So it's sort of a larger scale example but you know you can also look at a town road. So we deal with a lot of towns that are looking to replace crossings and towns in particular may not have the budget that somebody like DOT has and so it's especially important to design a culvert in the right way or a crossing in the right way so that it doesn't have to be replaced or you don't have to deal with that catastrophic damage. So this is just a town road example of an undersized culvert replaced with a nice open bottom arch with a natural substrate through it. It's really really good looking environment. That's kind of the medium scale I guess I would say and then you can even think about like small scale streams my solution. So this is just a private forest road again small very undersized culvert replaced with really nice quality bridge span and you know maybe this road exists to allow more recreation into a private forest or logging something like that it's probably just a dirt road. The other thing I'll point out is you know I enjoy fishing, angling myself in a lot of these forest environments and I think it's it's worth noting just the aesthetics of the bridge and how much better that looks than that little culvert and how much more likely I would be to try to catch a fish. So I'll just point that out as well. But you know in the end these are some of the ways that a solution is stream smart and there are many of them but a few of the key ones you know they just enable passage of fish and other organisms when they need to move. So the stream is allowed to sort of function as a stream and everything in it fish wildlife sediment woody debris all of that is allowed to move when it needs to you know we can't control when we get storms or when fish need to access certain you know things to survive to get through certain times of year but by maintaining the natural channel flow we can allow that to happen on its own time and on its own scale. I'll also point out that from a budgetary and monetary standpoint stream smart solutions are certainly smart in terms of you know you avoid that potential for catastrophic failure and they also are a lot easier to do from a permitting standpoint you know every time I see a stream smart crossing on my desk when I'm doing an environmental review it's like great I don't have to work too hard on this one you know I can prove it whereas otherwise you know you might have to redesign the whole thing so you know that's another way that these solutions are in fact stream smart and I think just to wrap it up again hammer at home stream smart crossings maintain fish and wildlife habitat while protecting roads and public safety stream can act like a stream they can it does what it needs to do at all flows and is durable for the long haul so you know all in all a good idea and really good solutions to many of the problems that you know we see in the natural environment so that's it for me Sarah can you go ahead and add me yourself sorry I thought I did didn't take my click thanks thank you Nick that was fantastic that's a perfect opener for the day to talk about stream smart we're now going to dive into the legal requirements and the regulatory oversight of crossings what we have because we have so much to cram in today is I've I've got half a dozen regulators here and I've asked them to actually pre-record their talk so that we don't have to switch between each of them so we're going to run five different talks on different regulations there we are not intending you to get every piece of information that you will need to deal with the regulatory oversight for our crossing and some of them may not apply we wanted to just provide you with an opportunity to actually see who those these regulating agencies are hear a little bit about the the regulations and where they you might intersect with them and give you contact information all of these folks are partners with stream smart they want to help you do a stream smart crossing so please reach out to them they're all wonderful people who are willing to help you so we're going to actually run through this video all of the agencies are represented here so there are questions that so if you have questions we will have those at the end and I do have one live talk and that's Tom Gilbert with the Forest Service the agencies represented are actually I'll introduce the folks who are with us we have Anna Smith who's an environmental specialist too with Maine DEP Department of Environmental Protection we've got Tim Carr who's a senior planner with Maine Lane Use Planning Commission Colin Greenan who's a project manager with the Army Corps of Engineers Wendy Mahaney is an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Eric Ham is a natural resources manager with Maine Department of Transportation not not completely a regulatory agency but they do have some oversight on crossings and then we have Tom Gilbert who's a water resources specialist with the Maine Forest Service I'm going to get us started let's keep using the Q&A for questions please and let's keep the chat for any technical issues like telling me that I'm that I'm muted let me just get the talks going I am Lucien Langua with the Maine DEP in the Bureau of Land Resources the DEP has four regional offices in this state and serves as the Environmental Regulatory Agency for the organized areas of Maine I work out of the southern Maine regional office located in Portland which serves just over 80 towns the DEP is responsible for managing protecting and enhancing the quality of Maine's water resources the Bureau of Land Resources is responsible for the licensing enforcement and oversight of many land development activities we do this with the help of the Natural Resources Protection Act the Natural Resources Protection Act NRPA or NERPA focuses on protecting natural resources protecting natural resources include coastal water resources freshwater wetlands river streams brooks lakes and certain wildlife habitats for the purposes of the NRPA river streams and brooks are interchangeable terms with the same meaning it is obvious to most people when an activity involves a river or trout stream but there can be some confusion over some smaller streams and brooks so it is important to note that a river streamer brook is a term solely defined in the NRPA not shoreland zoning laws or other laws to qualify as a river streamer brook the water feature must have a defined channel in addition the feature must have two or more characteristics that are described in our definition we also have a guidance document for the identification of NRPA regulated streams on our website a permit is required when an activity will be located in on over or adjacent to a stream adjacent just means within 75 feet measured horizontally of the normal high water line of a stream an activity that requires a permit would include filling dredging bulldozing removing or displacing soil sand vegetation or other materials or the construction repair or alteration of a permanent structure most stream crossing projects will involve earthwork such as filling activities and construction of a permanent structure all located in on over and adjacent to a stream therefore this results in the requirement of an nrpa permit so how do we permit a new stream crossing permit by rule or pbr can be used for certain classes of activities pbr is our easiest and fastest permit available it's a streamline process so there's a short 14-day review period and it's really just a notification to the DEP you're telling us that you intend to comply with a set of standards the standards for acceptable projects are listed in chapter 305 of the nrpa chapter 305 contains around 20 different sections with each section related to a particular activity for example section 10 is for stream crossings a crossing that will not meet pbr standards may require an individual nrpa permit a higher level of permitting a stream crossing structure must provide an opening with a cross sectional area at least equal to three times the cross sectional area of the stream channel or to accommodate a 25-year storm a cross sectional area is calculated by multiplying the stream channel width by the average channel depth remember you can obtain pbr information including help with sizing by contacting the DEP land bureau in your region or by going online to our website we also have an in-stream work window of July 15th to October 1st this is the ideal time to work within a stream as it minimizes the work's effect on fish and wildlife species especially during critical life history stages and spawning migrations remember temporary erosion control devices must always be installed on a project site prior to construction and maintained throughout the project's duration depending on the stream conditions certain techniques can include coffer dams pumping and water diversion ensuring that your work area is stable before during and after the work and having the right size crossing to handle the water flow is key to a successful long-lasting crossing pbr limits the total length of culverts to 75 feet proper alignment and placement of the culvert in the stream bed ensures proper fish passage this means setting below the stream bed elevation stabilized banks and proper compaction will ensure the crossing will last for many years an added benefit of proper installation techniques is a reduction in maintenance costs during a lifetime of the culvert a permit is not required from the DEP to replace a existing stream crossing provided that erosion control measures are taken to prevent the sedimentation of the water crossings cannot block fish passage crossings must be designed installed and maintained to match natural stream grade to avoid perching and drops crossings that are not open bottom must be embedded a minimum of one foot or at least 25 percent of the culverts diameter but not to exceed two feet thank you for listening if you have any questions on the presentation or would like more information please contact your nearest regional DEP office please see the contacts listed on the slide or go to our website www main.gov slash DEP slash land again thank you for listening and for your dedication to protecting mains river streams and brooks this is tim car planner with the land use planning commission based on the commission's augusta office in this video i'll briefly discuss the land use planning commission or lupc the lupc's policy goals for our water crossing standards what those standards are when permits are and are not required and how to obtain additional information and assistance from commission staff the lupc serves as the planning and zoning authority for the unorganized and deorganized areas of the state which include townships and most plantations in addition a few towns contract for our services these areas either have no local government or have chosen not to administer land use controls at the local level prior to the creation of the lupc in 2012 the land use regulation commission lurk had regulatory authority within the unorganized and deorganized areas our service area is shown in the shaded portions of the map each of the colors representing one of our five regions each with its own regional office indicated by a red star basic information about the extent of the unorganized territories is also shown the lupc stream crossing standards are found in chapter 10 of our rules section 10 27 d these standards were updated in 2019 to better incorporate stream start principles and to better align with d e p regulations it's important to note two things first the discussion that follows involves lupc standards for permanent crossings standards for temporary crossings those in place 180 days or less are different second in the lupc service area most land management roads and their associated water crossings are regulated by the main forest service rather than by the lupc the exceptions are land management roads that pass through lupc development sub districts or through development areas within resource protection plan sub districts water crossings on these roads will need to meet lupc standards for either temporary or permanent crossings depending on their duration in place our permanent stream crossing rules have a number of goals listed here and generally encompassing maintaining stream and water quality maintaining habitat connectivity and designing for larger and more frequent flood events to help achieve these goals the lupc has general work standards for all water crossings these include standards designed to minimize stream impact such as a low flow work window requirement to minimize in-stream work and requirements for water diversion and sediment control barriers in certain situations these goals are further achieved through requirements for the type of water crossing that can be used in certain situations and requirements for the sizing of crossings if a stream to be crossed is a perennial water course and has a sustained slope of more than 2% or if the water course is used for navigation a bridge or open bottom arch must be used to maintain the natural stream bed otherwise culverts may be used water crossings must be sized for the 25-year flood or have sizing based on three times the cross sectional area of the stream in addition they must also be at least 1.2 times channel width at normal high water however water crossings located in areas of special flood hazard must be sized to accommodate a 100-year flood event in addition to being at least 1.2 times channel width at normal high water if a water course is used for navigation there must be at least four feet of clearance available for boat passage during a normal high water period standards for installation and maintenance also help to achieve policy goals for water crossings the lupc has requirements for culvert installation shown here please note that culverts must be installed below stream bed elevation according to the following limits greater than two feet below stream bed elevation for box culverts and other culverts with smooth internal walls greater than one foot below for corrugated pipe arches and greater than one foot below and encompassing at least 25 of the culvert diameter for corrugated round pipe culverts also note that while stream bed substrate must be added to culverts greater than 60 inches in diameter bed development through natural deposition is allowed for smaller diameter culverts lupc rules also require that water crossings be maintained to continue to meet standards and facilitate the passage of fish and wildlife culverts that develop hanging inlets or outlets experience bed washout or do not match the characteristics of the natural stream channel must be repaired in certain circumstances installation of a water crossing requires a permit water crossings not in conformance with the previously described standards may be allowed by permit from the commission to obtain a permit however an applicant must show that a non conforming water crossing will produce no undue adverse impact upon the resources and uses in the area crossings of major waters also require a permit a major water is defined as a flowing water downstream from the point where such water drains 50 square miles or more crossings in certain lupc protection zones also require permits these include the aquifer protection flood prone area protection mountain area protection soil and geology protection and unusual area protection sub districts otherwise no permit is needed for crossings of minor flowing waters and other sub districts if the standards described previously are met however written notification of the installation must be sent to both the lupc and the army corps of engineers before work is begun this last slide presents key sources of information and contact information a link to our website is provided as well as a link to contact information from our regional offices we encourage anyone with questions about a specific project to contact the applicable regional office general inquiries however may also be made through our main phone line to our augusta office noted here along with that office's address lastly lupc staff have created a brochure to help the public meet the sizing and installation standards for culverts the brochure may be downloaded from our reports page linked here and covers topics such as identifying the normal high watermark and measuring stream width and depth once measurements of stream width and depth have been obtained users can refer to sizing tables in the brochure to determine the diameter of culvert to use thanks for listening and for installing stream smart crossings good morning on behalf of the corps of engineers new england district we'd like to thank you for taking the time today to attend the stream smart workshop my name is collin greenin and i'm a project manager in the main project office located in augusta a permit from the army corps of engineers is required prior to the placement of fill material into waters the united states waters the united states include streams and adjacent wetlands many stream smart crossings will require a core permit there are several types of permits that the core uses in the state of main the first are the main general permits these permits have an abbreviated process approximately 30 to 60 days and there are two categories of review sv and pcn which some of you remember as cat one and cat two most stream smart projects that we see can be authorized by these general permits there are rare cases when individual permits may be required generally this is when work will adversely affect the federally endangered atlantic salmon these require a full public interest review and decisions are generally made in 120 days please note that d up l upc and local permits are not a substitute for a core permit there may be some cases where you need a core permit and a db permit and possibly a local permit under the main general permit the following requirements are required for sv you cannot substantially disrupt species movement and high and low flows you have to use stream smart crossing principles including crossings with 1.2 bank full width crossings with a natural bottom substrate stream banks within those structures closed bottom culvert shall be embedded at least 25 percent and in stream work shall be conducted between july 15th and september 30th under sv there can be no effect to atlantic salmon or its designated critical habitat please note that slip and invert liners and culver extensions which are not stream smart are not allowed under sv recognizing that the requirements of sv are not always able to be achieved these projects can be reviewed under pcn in which case the requirements are now recommendations you still cannot substantially disrupt species movement and high and low flows however we strongly recommend stream smart to include structures with 1.2 bank full width structures with a natural bottom substrate stream banks within these structures closed bottom culverts embedded 25 percent we encourage the work to be done between july 15th and september 30th however there can be no adverse effects to atlantic salmon or its critical habitat after careful consideration slip lines and culvert extensions may be permitted under pcn in the rare case that an individual permit is required and this is typically when there's an adverse effect to atlantic salmon an individual permit is required the need for an individual permit is made on a case by case determination we strongly encourage pre-application coordination to discuss the details of your project we'll coordinate your application with our state and federal fisheries partners there will be a strong emphasis on avoidance and minimization and compensatory mitigation may be required for unavoidable impacts to waters the united states our new programmatic approach with us fish and wildlife service has greatly streamlined the general permit and individual permit processes for atlantic salmon if you need a core permit here is the process you'll need to fill out an application and provide the following materials ideally 60 days before you need your permit we will accept dep and lupc application forms you'll need to provide the core detailed and legible plans you'll need to provide an official species list notify mhpc in the five indian tribes of main you'll need to define purpose and need discuss avoidance and minimization measures and you must document all unavoidable impacts to waters the united states we generally correspond with our federal partners for agency review which includes endangered species consultation lastly the core will make its permit decision if affirmative construction may begin in which case you'll need to be in compliance with your core permit please contact any one of our seven project managers in the state of main if you have any questions about your stream smart crossing thank you good morning my name is wendy mahaney and i'm a biologist with the us fish and wildlife services main field office located in east orland main today i'm going to give a very brief overview of the interaction between the federal endangered species act and stream crossing projects in certain areas of main in the year 2000 the sea run or anadromous atlantic salmon was listed as an endangered species under the federal endangered species act this listed population is referred to as the gulf of main distinct population segment the gulf of main dps is not listed at the state level and is a different strain or life form than means landlocked atlantic salmon the pink area on this map shows the historic range of the gulf of main dps which includes many rivers in the mid coast region of main the down east region and some of main's major watersheds including the panopscot kennebecke and andrew scog and rivers the smaller area shown with cross hatching is designated critical habitat for atlantic salmon watersheds designated as critical habitat are places where endangered atlantic salmon are most likely to occur in main today main does still have a very small number of sea run atlantic salmon occurring in rivers outside of the area shown in pink like the saco river but these salmon are not listed under the federal endangered species act some stream crossing projects like replacing a culvert may involve an action by one or more federal agencies for example a project may need a permit from the core of engineers or a project may be getting federal funding or technical assistance from an agency like the federal emergency management agency for those projects with an intersection between endangered atlantic salmon and a federal agency the fish and wildlife service will work with you and the federal agency through an esa section seven consultation to assess the effects of the proposed project on salmon for those projects not involving a federal agency the esa still provides some protections for endangered salmon so please talk to the fish and wildlife services main field office about how this works if this is the case for your project recognizing the benefits for encouraging stream smart projects in areas where endangered atlantic salmon may occur the fish and wildlife service worked with the core and fema to streamline the federal permitting and esa consultation process this streamline process was completed in september of 2017 and is based on stream smart principles including don't pinch the stream set the crossing structures elevation slope and alignment to match the stream and have a natural stream bottom inside the structure this streamline process focuses mostly on atlantic salmon but for some projects there may be other federally listed species to address such as the canada lynx perhaps most importantly i want to emphasize that the streamline process dramatically speeds up the federal approval process once you submit an application for a core permit or for federal funding using this streamline process the project will go through a technical review of the stream crossing design to ensure that it meets all of the program requirements such as being at least 1.2 times thankful with after the project design is approved the federal agency will then complete esa consultation with the fish and wildlife service with a maximum timeline of 14 to 30 days again i want to emphasize that the streamline consultation process is much faster than before where consultation often could take several months to complete in closing if you have any questions about federal permitting and esa consultation including the streamline process please feel free to reach out to me and if you have technical questions about designing stream smart crossing projects please feel free to reach out to my colleagues bill bett or scott craig finally thank you and the fish and wildlife service looks forward to working with you on stream smart projects in main thank you hello my name is eric ham and i'm the division manager of the natural resources division the main duty environmental office yes main duty has an environmental office with folks from multiple disciplines including our some fish passage design experts and other folks that help gather resources and help get permits and authorizations to do stream crossing replacements around the state uh you know main duty has you know policies and there some laws on the books about kind of responsibilities with bridges and stream crossings and spans some of this most folks will be familiar with but you know anything over a 10 foot span is considered a bridge and then we have some other you know criteria other than that you know a minor span is a bridge that has a span between 10 and 20 feet and then a true bridge is something that is over 20 foot in span now all of these all these crossings that are over 10 feet actually get inspected every two years by this part of our inspection program so if you're working on upgrading one crossing that might be getting over 10 feet then there's some kind of interaction you know with how main duties inspection program and some of these responsibilities may work there is a relatively new fact sheet that's been circulated around that I have a link for later in the presentation that also explains this this little table was put together by our local road center I think that's a pretty good job kind of trying to explain responsibility of of each of the structures and on what type of road they fall on obviously structures on state highways are going to be responsibility of the state unless it comes into some of those issues with urban compact areas and and state aid roads the townways which would be the focus of a lot of folks here you know the the minor spans still live within the responsibility of the municipalities as well as the culverts and then the bridges themselves if they're kind of built to certain standards DOT can end up maintaining the the the responsibility for maintenance and future capital work you know main DOT regularly institutes stream smart principles we do a lot of work around the state on an annual basis a lot of crossings need to be upgraded and a lot more need to be upgraded we regularly use stream smart principles when we're working we're in the Atlantic salmon distinct population segment of Ohio in the Army Corps we have a large programmatic agreement that helps us process a lot of projects very quickly as long as we kind of follow stream smart principles in our in our design in our construction it's been a great program we're also implementing stream smart when we're working with our primarily our state resource agencies with some of our other important state resources that's the first job and other other searum you know and you know we have a lot of these projects out on the landscape now and so we've had a bunch of years that that we've been able to kind of work through designing and constructing and then the monitoring programs on these structures following that you know and I can say that some of the major challenges that we run and do are you know and are you know stream bed recreation and the picture you see here that's a four-sided box ballroom so the stream on the inside of the box has to be completely reconstructed and trying to get the right material a stable material a material that simulates kind of some natural material in there and having specifications and specification review in the field and constructability requirements is a real challenge it's not a not an easy process so also bank lines you see in this project there's some bank lines in there you end up going using structures that are larger than 1.2 bank full width or one or even larger than a bank full width you know banks are necessary you know part of a stream function and keeping the channel to find different flows and variability and roughness and lots of other points but constructing them inside of structures and hitting the right heights and keeping them stable also becomes a real challenge here at Main DOT you we're a real big organization you see we have five regions there across the state and see on the different colors we have offices and all of those five five regions that can be contacted we also have a bridge maintenance office here in the Augusta office and the bridge maintenance folks would be the first folks to contact if you're talking about potentially constructing a bridge especially anything that's bigger than 20 feet you want to contact those folks early and talk to them about your plans and they can help guide you and give you some advice the the fact sheet I mentioned earlier is that that link just below the bridge maintenance contact information we also have a main local road center here if you've ever seen any talks have been involved with Pete Kaufflin and his group they're fantastic folks so I would encourage you if you have questions to reach out either the bridge maintenance office or the local road center or even the region on that slide so again stream as far as and their principal's been very handy for folks here at Main DOT and I'll be happy to take some questions later that's the first section I do want to wrap up with one last regulatory talk and so we have Tom Gilbert who is a water resources specialist with the Main Forest Service and he is going to talk to us about the BMPs and some of the oversight that the Main Forest Service has with four-street projects so Tom if you can share your screen. Good morning everyone my name is Tom Gilbert with the Main Forest Service this morning I wanted to go over a couple of guidance documents we have for permitting of stream crossings associated with timber harvesting activities so you can find both of these guidance documents on our website at mainforeservice.gov you can find them under oh slides are not advancing I think maybe I need to have some kind of control over my presentation or maybe someone else could advance in forming. If you are sharing your screen I think it's going to be up to you but I do have your time there it is there we go all right I have control great thanks so as I was saying those guidance documents are available on our website under at mainforeservice.gov under forest policy and management you want to click on water resources and then at that best management practices tab there or if you just google main forest service water resources they'll bring you right to this website and you click on best management practices and you can view a couple of our guidance documents the first one I want to go over is this permitting guidance document it's a quick reference chart we have for stream crossing permitting at timber harvesting sites and so this chart was designed to answer the questions do you need a permit and what permit do you need and it was designed to give you a general idea of the regulatory landscape you see here that big blue box is the nrpa which we talked about briefly the natural resources protection act and then within that we have statewide standards for our for timber harvesting in shoreland areas and then we have that purple box town ordinances and then the green box are regulations for the unorganized territory so I'll just have a quick look at this by each box real briefly the natural resources protection act it's just giving you some real fundamental information on the nrpa some of the main points there so a permit by rule is the generally the permit you're going to be looking for for a permanent crossing in organized territories that's described there at the top below that temporary crossings just says that those do not require a permit under that timing so if your crossing is being installed between October 2nd in July 14th there's a process through the inland fisheries and wildlife that you would have to engage in and then exemptions maintenance repair and replacement do not require permits so just some of the main points there of the nrpa moving down you can see those requirements for towns that have adopted statewide standards for timber harvesting in shoreland areas again a permit by rule is required in those towns for those option two towns towns that have adopted statewide standards under option two they may have some kind of local permitting requirements as well so you want to have a have a look at their ordinance to see if there's any additional permitting requirements and in that purple box there are town ordinances these are towns that have not adopted statewide standards and you can see here that they also require a permit by rule and again they may have additional requirements for timber harvesting activities and at the bottom in the green box chapter 27 rules which apply to the unorganized territory that is going to really depend on which sub-district you're in and what water body you're crossing so you may just need to declare your crossing on a forest operations notification and just provide a map this identifies that crossing or you may also need to submit a forest operations permit and in some cases you may also need to submit a bridge construction permit again this very much depends on the sub-district you're in and the water body you're crossing and at the bottom there you see some contact information in general if you're in the unorganized territories you want to contact your regional enforcement coordinator and there's some info there for them and then if it's a question regarding permit by rule you can contact me and so that's our permanent quick reference chart again at mainforestservice.gov in the water resources section or you can just google main forest service water resources and you should be able to find it pretty quickly. The second guidance document I want to cover is a PBR application guidance so if you find that you need a permit by rule this guidance document will come with your PBR application and you'll just see that it's going to highlight a few of the fields there in your application and just go into a little bit more detail as to what we're looking for in each one of those fields and then on the reverse side there are installation standards so a summary of what we're looking for in a stream crossing and this is the bare minimum requirements that we need to see in a stream crossing that you've constructed through a permit by rule you see items 1 through 7 there all things that we expect to see if we were to have a look at your crossing in a follow-up inspection. So those are the two guidance documents I wanted to cover quickly this morning again mainforestservice.gov you can always contact me with any questions on that and we're always available for our on-site assistance as well thank you very much. Thank you Tom let's take we don't have any questions in the Q&A that I'm seeing but let's take five minutes and give folks an opportunity that was a lot in a short period of time let things sink in I don't know if we can have our regulators just turn on their their videos and we can maybe spur some questions I don't know if any folks have any I'm not seeing any in the Q&A hopefully that means that we've answered all questions people might have had as opposed to folks are mapping this morning. A question about making the slides available yeah they're the recording will be made available and the slides are part of that we also what we usually do at the end of these workshops is we turn the slides into PDFs so that they are available on streamsmartmain.org there's a ton of resources there including contact information for all these folks or at least their agencies and some of the details some of the like the handout that Eric mentioned for DOT and some of the BMP information that Tom mentioned a lot of the information that the the agencies have mentioned here are available on streamsmartmain.org and Tom go ahead. Hi yeah I have a quick question for the Army Corps I was wondering if you could talk about any exemptions if there are any for permitting of stream crossings for timber harvesting activities. Sorry I'm trying to get my my stuff working again here you can hear me right we can we can hear you and we can see you now okay we're good now um yeah so when it comes to the timber industry in silver culture the Corps of Engineers has you know what we call exemptions for those activities so they have their own standards they're not exactly called stream smart or stream simulation but within the regulations the industry is pretty much expected to follow these types of things and we've seen a lot of waste block bridges out there in traditionally forested areas and it's not perfect by any means but generally speaking that industry is a little bit hands-off with regard to core permitting. Very thanks a lot. Go ahead Eric I'm not sure if you're seeing the question in the chat there's a specific question for you and if that wasn't what you were going to say you can follow up with answering the chat. I had my hand up before the question so I just wanted to mention real quickly that we do one thing this presentation was recorded last year DOT has kind of a new program where we actually have hired somebody we call a bridge ranger and he's an old DOT not that he's old but he was at main DOT for a lot of years and retired and he's actually available for towns to do on-site engineering advice go out and look at projects and it's really a cool service and his name is Jim Foster and we have like a little kind of pamphlet and so I can share that link with people but just to encourage towns as you're trying to kind of look at you know maybe engineering options or what's going on that that he's a great contact and that's a really good new program that we have out there and so see what I got for Ken's question here oh yeah so for for rail the rail stuff I can never seem to keep track of what we own slash what other people own slash a lot of time the DOT ends up being a conduit for funds that go from FRA to rail and so DOT has some involvement we have to essentially help FRA ensure that all their NEPA requirements are met so different rail is different and then some rails will apply for some federal funding to do some stuff and it comes kind of through us and then we gain some responsibilities as it goes through so yes I've done a lot of permitting for rail projects or help over the years but it doesn't mean that that's every rail that we get involved in so sorry for the vague answer Ken hopefully that answers what you're looking for thanks Eric and we can post that pamphlet on our stream smart main dot org page there's a resources page where you can get access to a lot of these things any other questions I'd like this this cross agency questioning is great too if any of our other regulators have any questions for each other here's your chance for comments and if not we will have a chunk of time at the end of the whole workshop so if something percolates up between now and then we can bring them up at the end as well and if not let's we're only five minutes behind which is amazing considering the technical problems that I had this morning let's let's still take that 10 minute break so we will be back at 1015 we will see you all back in 10 minutes hopefully most folks are returning to their computers after taking a little bit of a break we are actually going to jump into another little video section and I want to introduce the star of the video who is here with us we have Alex Abbott he is an independent stream restoration specialist and he works in partnership with many of the organizations who were in that first partnership slide who work on StreamSmart including working with a lot of towns around the state and some of the state agencies and I'm going to let him introduce this video. Thanks Sarah and good morning to everyone I'm sorry we can't be together but and in fact I'm sorry that I'm about to show you a video that includes me sometimes I'm a little embarrassed by it I'm much happier to be with you in person standing around the stream table showing you how a stream works through the use of this stream model but I like this approach anyway because a lot of people can be involved whereas normally only a very small number of people can be standing around the stream table I certainly hope the video does some justice to the the utility of the model and I think then we'll have a little time at the end of it to see if you have any questions or comments about it I hope certainly it gives you a different perspective on things and I think we'll let her roll well I hope you all enjoyed that I cringe a little bit hearing myself so much and looking at the funny differences of scale of the gigantic turtle and whatnot but I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe saw some things that helped spur your thinking about stream smart crossings and perhaps projects you have in mind I'd love it if you have any comments or questions about it let's take a few minutes now to to bring those out thanks Alex I think folks are still absorbing that fantastic video there is a question about financial assistance I'll actually go into that towards the end of the talk today let me check and see if there's anything in the chat any questions for Alex on the stream table it's always more fun to do live and in person of course and that actually usually stimulates the conversation it's a little a little harder when we're doing it virtually but at least we can reach more folks when we're doing it virtually absolutely and I certainly wasn't expecting a lot of questions now but I will be sticking around I will be available at the end of the because I know there's some other questions I saw in the q&a that I'd love to work on answering that we can speak to together in the end so thanks thanks Alex and folks you can you can always throw more questions in the q&a as we go just throughout as things occur to you and we will address them at the very end and we're actually now back on our schedule so I'm actually going to turn over the controls to Heidi Bunn she's an aquatic restoration engineer with the natural resources conservation service and she's actually going to get dive a little deeper into the technical aspects of actually building a stream smart crossing take it away Heidi good morning everybody hopefully you can hear me now you can see my screen um so as Sarah mentioned I'm the aquatic restoration engineer for the nrcs in Maine um and today I'm going to give you an overview of what really goes into creating a stream smart crossing the stream smart is really just a simplified version of the us forest services stream simulation design the goal of making the road invisible to the stream and allowing natural stream processes to occur like regulating the flow of water moving organisms and material up and downstream maintaining water temperature and providing habitat for our native species if you really remember only one thing today remember our stream smart golden rule let the stream act like a stream we want to install a structure that the stream does not know is there and that is really shift and focus from trying to squeeze the stream through a culvert to designing a road to go over a stream so in stream smart out's covered a little bit of this but we have a couple of different options in order of preference so first we have we can avoid creating crossing the first place is there an alternative access point that we can use keep in mind that costumes cross not only to install them but also to maintain them so if we can reroute a road in order to avoid crossing a stream that is really our preferred option and number two if the road is no longer used we can remove the old crossing and restore the channel to a natural condition or three we can install an open bottom structure that meets at least the 1.2 tons bank for width can pass our design storm and allows for the passage of target aquatic species and multiple flows this is really the most common option that we utilize in stream smart when we're trying to replace the existing crossing as we have several different structures that we can use and the final option is to install an embedded culvert using a full stream simulation design method to really rebuild the channel and thanks to the culvert we would prefer to allow the stream to be able to adjust on its own but sometimes costs and site conditions won't allow us to install open bottom structure so any of these structures that you can see on the screen can be a stream smart solution if they're designed correctly to span the stream and you follow that golden rule if you need to only access the site for a short period of time you can think about installing a temporary bridge deck as an option this gives you a relatively inexpensive way to cross the stream temporarily without disrupting natural stream processes and since they'll be removed your future maintenance costs are avoided a more permanent option would be an engineered bridge deck with the buttons installed below the potential scour level the bridge deck could be composed of timber or precast concrete and we typically use steel girders for support bridges can be used in a wide variety of sites and are really customizable depending on the state conditions and how it's used sometimes we have low lying sites and we just don't have the room to be able to install a structure with um that's really deep so we have bottomless box culverts um and this lets us span the stream and pass our design storm without having to raise our roads in the valley these structures can be made out of metal or precast concrete and they can sometimes be quickly quick to install and lastly we have our open bottom arch culverts that come in handy in sites with higher road fill or we need a wider road these typically can last for over 50 years and can have a lot less maintenance requirements than a typical timber deck bridge but every stream has its own challenges and we are lucky to have so many different structural options to choose from so if we've gone through our stream smart options and we know we can't avoid or remove the crossing an open bottom structure won't work we can look at embedding a pipe embedded pipes are really great at distributing loads when we're working on big soils there's a lot of additional work that goes into the surveying and designing structures in order to ensure that we can pass our design storm safely we'll still follow that golden rule to avoid creating future aquatic orders of passage barriers we embed a pipe we're really limiting limiting the stream's ability to adjust vertically and horizontally so getting that elevation and the inside span correct is really critical to success just like open bottom structures we still want to have a continuation of the stream banks and the streambed to the structure to mimic the natural condition of the stream this photo shows a 17 foot span embedded corrugated metal culvert that replaced a seven foot diameter pipe in new blaster main and they did a geotech investigation at the site and they found that they had marine clays so they opted to go with an embedded pipe to distribute loads more evenly on the soil and to try to keep costs down the new crossing which you can see is seven feet high and there's two feet of material buried inside that culvert so Alex kind of alluded to this but keep in mind that for all embedded pipes we have to get that material in there somehow it has to get compacted so keeping your construction crew happy by making the culvert as big as possible will make things go a lot smoother for you you can see in this photo that there's some rock placed along both sides of the culvert to create those banks with a low flow chain on the middle I just really want to emphasize now and I will later the importance of continuing the stream banks to the structure because they're really used by all sorts of critters who would rather continue their daily stroll through the structure instead of having to go up and over when we got to this crossing was installed Alex Abbott was out on the site and he saw a red fox walking along the side but it's not just fish that we care about as I mentioned before all the stream bed material has to get installed installed inside the culvert and having seen a construction crew using wheelbarrows and carrying rocks by hand hunched over inside the culvert scowling at me it can make for a really long day this photo shows an embedded 19 and a half foot span precast concrete box culvert that is actually a clam shell mean that the top can stay open while you install the stream bed and the banks are in place this allows for an excavator to help place the material inside the structure and everyone can stand up straight this culvert was embedded about two feet and it's really important that the stream bed material be compacted so water continues to flow over the top of the material instead of through it so you don't have a disappearing stream and I know you've seen some of these photos earlier but I just want to emphasize that installing a stream smart structure is really an investment in your property with many benefits that we'll discuss but I just want to touch on why retrofitting existing crossings can do more harm than good the photos here show great examples of the old design thought process of trying to squeeze as much water through the structure as efficiently as possible without really taking into consideration ecological impacts lining a culvert with either smooth plastic liner as shown on the left or concrete as shown on the right can increase the lifespan of a structure that may have started to rest out on the bottom and replacing the entire structure would be really expensive because maybe there's a lot of road fill over the top of it or utilities or keeping the road closed for a long period of time it's not really possible so even though the liners are decreasing the total area of the structure they're really increasing the velocity of the water so you end up with a fire hose effect this causes significant scour at the culvert outlet perching the culverts even more than they already were and ultimately reducing the chronic water impact so in stream smart we have four or five s's depending on how you want to count them but I'm going to go with five s's for our rules of thumb and as I mentioned before stream smart is really just a simplified version of the us for services stream simulation method which is a thousand page document and kind of condensed it so that we can get a lot of people talking about the same thing using the same window so you just want to highlight these five s's as things to think about when you're planning and designing a stream smart structure this slide shows you know we want to span a stream we want to set the elevations right the slope and the skew match the stream and we want to make sure that we actually have substrate through the crossing if all five s's are incorporated into the design we know we'll met the golden rule so when we say span the stream what we mean is installing a structure that lets the stream act like a stream in order to do this we need to figure out what the channel dimensions should be at the site if we live in a perfect world without barriers if we want we want to get the measurements outside the influence of the existing crossing so that we avoid creating a pinch point in the stream this photo shows an approximately eight foot diameter pipe in a 16 to 18 foot wide stream creating the classic construction of the stream culver is a static structure in a dynamic environment and streams will move vertically and horizontally over time and a stream smart solution allows for these changes to occur whereas an undersized culver did not this photo shows a great example of what spading the stream really means at a minimum we want to design a structure with a span that is at least the 1.2 tons bankable width to give us room to install a low flow channel and stream base inside the structure we're trying to maintain the stream bank and stream bed connectivity for aquatic and terrestrial critters to be designed in this photo you can see the banks inside the culver blending into the natural stream banks and how the channel cross section is being obtained we'll talk a little later about the importance of bank building the data to gather when you're surveying but keep in mind that getting accurate measurements of the bankable width outside of the influence of the crossing is key to the stream smart design so the typical aop barriers that we encounter caused by that are caused by undersized culverts include velocity barriers physical barriers like height and thermal barriers this illustration shows how an undersized culver except at the stream grade can turn into an aop barrier the top right hand corner you can see overhead view of the undersized culvert like the one that we saw in the earlier slides the culvert is pinching the stream and pooling water upstream think of the culvert like a funnel which is trying to force water through an arrow the middle drawing shows the water backing up with the inlet and then accelerating for the culvert and shooting out through the outlet like a fire hose this turbulence or extra force has enough energy to move the stream bed material and over time enough material will actually be displaced creating the classic perch culvert scenario as seen in the bottom drawing in many situations we can end up with an additional aop barrier low flows from the material displaced by the punch pool creating kind of a damn downstream so here's a real-world example of what happens when you don't get it right in 2006 a 12 foot span concrete box culvert was set at an existing channel grade on a very large rocky stream in Blanchardville for 2008 the culvert had already become perched and you can see how low flows um through the culvert with no natural stream bed material are you know it's very shallow very fast no banks within the culvert but 2010 the perch had increased a lot really illustrating how quickly an undersized structure can become aop barrier luckily there was funding and the structure has been replaced with the 35 foot span bridge restoring natural stream processes and it's working really great so after we figured out how big the structure needs to be the next step is making sure we set the elevations right one of the things that we stress in stream smart design is the need for a long stream profile so we can really figure out how deep this of the above and what the channel bottom elevation should be streams are a dynamic system we're constantly adjusting by spanning the stream we're giving it room horizontally by setting the elevations right we are giving it room to adjust vertically and to allow for the natural stream processes to occur by understanding that we're setting up the crossing for success slope and skew are two things I don't feel like people normally think about when they're looking at a crossing but I think there are two things that can drastically change the type and the size of the structure being installed we talked about the slope of the channel this is really where the long profile comes in handy and helps us to make sure that we're setting the channel bottom elevations correctly at the crossing are we in a steep section with a series of step pools and boulders that are not going to move or are we in a flatter section of pools and ripples with gravels and cobbles that are more likely to move with the storm events or is our crossing in a transition area going from a steep section to a flatter section where smaller material will settle out knowing what the slope should be through the crossing gives us an idea as to how much the channel is going to adjust up and down over various flows so that we can design a structure that can handle that so once so we know we need to span the stream and we know what elevations we want the channel to be the crossing now we need to look at the layout the streams are not always straight it may flow towards the crossing at an angle to the road this is what we call skew it's often overlooked during the planning process and tends to lead to major maintenance issues in the future we want to install the stream smart crossing parallel with the stream but it's much easier for a contractor to install the structure perpendicular to the road so there's a balance between the golden rule of letting the stream be a stream and constructability but if we account for the skew during the design process we save ourselves headaches during construction of the future storm events so making the bridge longer we can maintain stream alignment while keeping the bridge deck in line with road and reduce pressure on the abutments while being able to pass ice or what do you bring but taking slope in the skew taking slope and skew into account or a relay study without their success so these are a couple of simple tests that you can do when you actually go out to a road stream crossing trying to determine how well it was working with regards to the elevation that it was installed at these photos show a pretty typical situation where upstream and downstream look drastically different downstream you have a flowing stream with trees lining the banks providing cover and some extreme work for habitat looking upstream you see potted water and a lot of dead trees the elevation at the inlet and outlet of the culvert is about the same and you don't really have a perched situation when you see a disconnect between the up and downstream structure up and downstream like this is really a natural situation and we have to ask ourselves what is really going on when we see a potted water like this we normally want to blame it on the beavers but as you can see in the photos there's not a beaver dam the culvert inlet and there's no debris blocking the culvert inlet either in this situation the backwater is really caused by the pipe being set too high and we can still have this issue of the channel spinning structure as well if we do not see elevation correct luckily the site from the previous slide was replaced with a stream smart crossing set at the correct elevation and the old channel started to reappear and vegetation started to grow where there was once we potted water it always amazed me at how quickly things can change upstream at the time and these trees will eventually regrow and provide cover for the upstream channel keeping water cool for a native brook trout and salmon on the opposite end of the spectrum if you come to a crossing that looks like this you can see the channel looks pretty much the same upstream and downstream you have a free flowing channel with no impounded water and similar streambed material so you know that the elevation although not perfect is much closer to what it should be note that there is some substrate in the existing culvert although it doesn't cover the bottom completely because you can kind of see the metal corrugation of the culvert and there's no banks inside helping to form that stream cross such theater ideally this pipe would be set lower and wider so the banks could be installed and the channel would channel bed would mimic up and down stream conditions so although not a perfect crossing but not as bad as stream connectivity goes so what we're really looking for are seamless inlets now we want to install crossing so there's no disruption channel bottom of the inlet and the outlet you can see the nice banks inside the crossing that serve a lot of different purposes which we'll talk about a little later again those are those banks that were built in so the last us that we're going to talk about is making sure there's substrate in the crossing what we mean by that is making sure that the material through the crossing mimics the natural channel bed material this is important for the habitat of aquatic species as our goal is to improve instrument activity as we talked about with the slope of the stream knowing what types of instrument features should be present with the crossing is important it's amazing how quickly a channel will start to readjust itself once an undersized culvert is taken out sometimes the channel might need a little more help and that is when we start adding things back in with folder clusters or step pools it cannot be overstated how important having natural stream bed material inside the crossing is if you look at this crossing although it lacks stream bank at least has a lot of substrate of different sizes and shapes inside allowing the stream to act like it does upstream downstream as the flow as the stream flows over and around the boulders and cobbles and gravels it creates a variety of different velocities creating small eddies and allowing fish and other critters to navigate through the crossing that they do in the natural stream in a stream smart structure where we expand the stream set the elevation slope right and account for skew the natural strut straight to move in and out of the crossing just as it does everywhere else in the system again as the stream flows over and around these boulders it's going to create a lot of different velocities and this is just a little illustration of you know the different things that are going to potentially be going on that if we just had a smooth bottom concrete or just the corrugated metals that you're not going to get if you did not embed a culvert or have an open bottom structure so we've talked about the five s's of stream smart design we're spanning the stream we're setting the elevation right our slope and our skew max the stream and we have substrate in the crossing so in order to create a sustainable and cost effective design that incorporates the five s's we first need to do a lot of solid in-stream assessment or field survey we can do a lot of research before you even go out in the field with free survey scoping they're looking at available LiDAR data and topo maps we can look at work with photography we can check out stream stats to get an S in the closing bank for widths using a regression equation this couldn't give us a bigger picture before we even head out in the field to collect the stream profile across sections in our stream data once we've collected all this data we can move on to step two and start working on the actual stream smart design which would not be possible without all the vital survey data that was collected so like I said before we went step foot outside there's a lot of background information we can look at to give us a better idea as to what's going on the site the mainstream habitat viewer is a great place to start your site is actually listed in the database you can see what type of crossing and is already there the road fill height and even photos of the site you can also look at topo maps and aerial photos of the site to identify areas where you may need to explore once you're out on site or potential obstacles that you might encounter like a deadwater upstream crossing as I mentioned earlier deadwater upstream might be an indicator of an undersized crossing said the wrong elevation so you can kind of start piecing together what is going on out there ahead of time and lastly before you go out you can also run stream stats this is one hydrologic tool and is free and available free to use and gets quick insight into what you might expect from the size of your watershed and what flows your crossing needs to handle running stream strats prior to your site visit really lets you identify potential places that you should investigate to see if they're cross turn culverts or road systems that could impact the size of your watershed and you know this is kind of the output that you would get from stream stats giving you your different flows as your different starter banks so once you have your boots or your waiters on the ground you're ready to start collecting the data you need to start designing a proper stream start survey the field survey consists of a long stream profile that gets you outside the influence of the existing crossing so that you can determine the correct channel bottom elevation and slope through the new stream start crossing this in turn allows you to figure out how deep to set your putters or your buttons so they're below the potential scour level the stream profile also gives you insight into the amount of road fill currently in place which can help narrow down what type of stream start structure you want to install in addition to the stream profile you'll also want to survey cross sections up and downstream that will help determine your structure width and the general shape of your channel we want to mimic the natural channel cross section and the stream banks through the stream smart crossing so this is a critical element in the design process and lastly the substrate characterization is going to tell us what size material we need to need to use to build the stream bed through the structure but also what size rock we need to have stable banks streams are a dynamic system we want to have stream bed material that is moving in and out of the structure as if the crossing was not there we don't want to rip arm around stream banks I know that I will say this at least 10 more times but I cannot stress how important a long stream profile is in getting your design right you really have to get outside the influence of your existing road and your crossing to figure out what the natural stream should look like this is probably a lot longer than you might think that you should go but it's well worth the effort and the scoping you did ahead of time can help you figure out what data you need to collect or go investigate as a general rule you want to go turn 20 to 30 times the width of your stream upstream and downstream so for a 10 foot wide stream you're looking at surveying at least 200 feet upstream and 200 feet downstream which is what was done in this potting stream profile here so this is just a simple illustration of how we're collecting that data the white line is showing our tail bottom elevations and the road surface the green tripod is representing the level that we're going to be used to serve in the stream sitting on top of the road and the blue line shows the water level at the time of survey and flowing through the existing culvert notice that the pool at the outlet of the culvert is much deeper than the other pools we see in this stretch of stream this is the typical plunge pool that we see with an undersized culvert this can tell us what can happen to the stream drain stream event the survey process is simple and you're really trying to capture the highs and lows in the channel in this example we're capturing the top of the riffle and the deepest part of the pool along the existing culvert and road elevation once we have this information plotted we can look at the high points of the features to determine what the channel should look like and if we connect the bottom points we can look at our typical scour depth this is a lot of critical information that you won't learn if you don't go far enough in your survey and it allows us to set the new stream smart structure safely below the level of scour so here's another example of a stream profile showing a culvert set to pi and a deep plunge pool you'll be really careful at what you're looking at in the area with an influence of the culvert as this rarely this is rarely natural features at this site there's sediment that has accumulated upstream because the culvert was set to pi material wasn't able to move naturally there's also material downstream that has accumulated that could be left over from the plunge pool or because the road has overtop multiple times when you know from the material that's actually at the stream we have a deep plunge pool downstream that's much deeper than what is seen in the rest of the system indicating that the culvert is undersized and acting like like a fire hose so this is a profile from an eight foot wide stream with a 30 inch diameter culvert and Phillips main again our typical rule of thumb is to survey 20 to 30 times the stream width which would have been about 200 feet upstream 200 feet downstream but you can see what they surveyed is about twice that so let's talk about what information they're able to gain by surveying almost 100 times the stream width the bottom lot the brown line is the survey channel bottom and the gray dash line is estimated channel flow you can see how much material is accumulated upstream and downstream making channel artificially too high surveying the old way right at the crossing it would have gotten the channel slope pretty close but it would have been at the wrong elevation using the minimum stream smart guide of 20 to 30 times the stream width it would have gone about 200 feet upstream downstream it would have gotten the slope and the elevation wrong but the guys that were out surveying knew from scoping up the site and from experience that they still hadn't gotten outside to influence the crossing so they opted to extend the survey it didn't take them a lot more time to get the data but it was only way to get the slope and elevation correct it's never going to hurt to get more data you don't have to use it but at least you already have it so you say stream width and bank full width and ordinary high watermark but what we're really talking about is you know with where waters will start to flow into the flood plain which is about every 1.2 to one and a half years and this is generally where you see woody vegetation start this can be tricky a tricky measurement to take so taking several measurements upstream and downstream outside the crossing in the woods and taking average is your best bet we're out surveying our cross sections we're going to define that flood plain our top of banks noting where our bank full width starts where our waterline is and the channel bottom to get the shape of our low flow channel and our banks correct through our new structure through our new structure and this is just another depiction of the cross section from the main force service BMP manual just showing another assessment method the field cross sectional area method is simple it requires just a tape and a rod to figure out how wide indeed the stream is you would average measurements you took to get the average depth to your normal high watermark or bank full and multiply it by your width to get your cross sectional area in this example you have a six foot wide channel with an average depth of one foot six feet open area some of the regulatory agencies talked earlier about requiring a new crossing to have at least three times the cross sectional area of the stream but you really won't be installing a structure that meets the golden rule of letting the stream be extreme with that area stream smart structure is meant for designs is at least the 1.2 times bank full width for about five times the cross sectional area of the stream so although the stream smart crossing might be larger you're really installing a structure that is going to be more resilient to larger storm events allowing debris and ice to pass so the last part of our field assessment is looking at the substrate and stream you want to take these measurements in an undisturbed section of the stream that will have a similar slope and cross section to our crossing these measurements are taken in the area of our cross section and it's called a pebble count where we randomly measure 100 pebbles I suggest doing this on a day that is relatively warm and the water is not very deep but this gives us the data to figure out what the distribution material is that we can recreate the stream by doing the crossing so after all of our survey data is collected we can finally just start working on our design there are many different structures that can be stream smart and our survey data costs that we're working with and our site conditions can help us these are a couple of examples of stream smart structures and you'll notice that the pipe arch in the bottom right hand corner is the only structure that is not bottomless the pipe arch would be installed as an embedded pipe with stream banks and channels at the built-in structure so these again these are examples of some of the different stream smart options we have an open bottom structure embedded box culverts provide a longer cross of life reducing costs over time while embedded pipes can have can still provide stream smart benefits as long so let's go through a couple different examples so here in the open bottom arch culvert that replaced one of the culverts we saw earlier that was pinching the stream the red circle is roughly the size and location of the old culvert so you can really see how much more room we are keeping the stream the pipe art or the arch culvert allows us really to span the stream and set the elevation right while the open bottom naturally matches the stream slope and allows for a natural substrate to exist you can see in the white line drawn in that's really the channel cross section that we tried to rebuild with banks on each side and the low flow channel so this is an example of a timber deck bridge that replaced the failing culverts on a gravel road in Williamsburg main this 18 foot span timber bridge with steel girders and concrete blocks took about 18 hours to install from start to finish and cost roughly $12,000 in 2012 it'll be a little bit more now but still relatively inexpensive and overall scale things so like the arch culvert the five s's were met with the open bottom structure and allowed for a seamless transition as the stream passed through the crossing bridges are very versatile as the span and height can be easily changed to adapt to the situation bridge decks can be composed of timber as shown here but also precast concrete which requires a few events embedded culverts require more work than an open bottom structure to recreate the stream bed but as you can see in these photos and result looks great this is a 19 and a half foot wide embedded clamshell concrete box culvert that replaced a five foot diameter metal pipe again the advantage of doing a clamshell versus the pipe arch is the ability to keep the top open during the placement of the stream bed material and the rock for the banks which really makes things go a lot faster I won't go into a lot of detail here but I just want to say that when when creating that stream bed this has really done in layers so that we can wash the material and make the channel more impervious so we don't end up with a disappearance stream you want to keep water flowing over the top of the substrate and not through to maintain the chronic work of the passage and not all arch culverts are metal this photo shows a before and after of an 11 and a half foot span bottomless arch concrete arch culvert that replaced a two and a half foot diameter metal pipe in whitefield name so this is the before and after of that long stream profile we looked at a little while ago where they ended up serving a lot more than normal to get outside to influence the culvert to get the flow from the elevation right the 12 and a half foot wide embedded concrete box culvert replaced the two and a half foot diameter metal pipe that have been failing every year because it was set too high was undersized the new structure was set about three feet lower and this was a great partnership with the town to teach them how to properly install a shoe start crossing so they can apply so once you've chosen your structure you need to make sure that it fits and make any adjustments the stream profile is what is impacting your elevation your slope through your crossing you can see in this illustration that the base of the buttons are being set below the channel bottom and the potential scour level the survey cross sections are helping to determine the span of your structure and where those banks should be to provide continuity upstream downstream the substrate data that was collected helped to size the riprap used to armor the abutments and build the banks and to recreate the streambed and this is the photo of that crossing the previous slide where the culvert was set three feet too high you can see how much more capacity the new structure has as a cross sectional area is about 10 times more so once we've set the proposed elevations for a stream smart structure we can test to see what the different flows will actually do through that structure as i mentioned before stream stats is one place that you can get flows but there are many other programs available to determine flows and then you can create a hydraulic model and head grass or h y a is shown here to see her proposed crossing can handle the design storm h y 8 was developed by the federal highway administration and it's free and easy to use for simple inlet control structures the output will let you know how high the water is going to be at your structure inlet at different flows and what your outlet velocity will be the stream smart we're trying to leave about 23 percent headspace open for passive debris above our design storm we also want to keep the outlet velocities low enough at the one and two year storm events for critters to still be able to make it upstream and avoid potential scour and i'd like to finish up by talking about a couple things to consider in the design and construction phase you heard earlier today about permitting we have a limited in-stream work window from july 15th to september 30th to start the permitting process early make sure your designs include the detailed information like cross sections and elevations that you got from your survey and make sure that you have a solid water and sediment control plan in place and potentially contingency plans before you start construction you have to maintain downstream flow during construction and do some digging to see what's going on below the surface of your structure do you have bedrock or are there marine clays that require specialized knowing that stuff ahead of construction will save a lot of headaches and lastly having stable and connected banks and the crossing is crucial to enabling passage of terrestrial animals and it does take practice so you can see this is a plan view of a potential water control plan you have block nets set upstream and downstream preventing the passage of any fish and other aquatic creatures from entering our work area we have copper dams in place preventing the stream from flowing through the site so we can keep clean water clean and we can take that dirty water and pump it out into a sediment basin before it reenters the system so here's a real-world example of a site where dewatering was was and could have potentially been a nightmare on the river left side you can see that they use sandbags to prevent water from entering the work area where they're setting the footers while the stream flute with maintain flow through the center and on the right side they use another type of cofferdam to keep water out of the site and they have dirty pumps taking that dirty water and pumping it out into pay bale sediment basin so that you know you have to clean water clean here's another site this is of one of those clamshell box culverts where the engineer designed a bypass channel so that they can maintain stream flow not have to have pumps on all the time to keep that water flowing downstream they did use pumps to pump out any dirty water from the construction area and this is an example of one of the sediment basins that you could build pretty simple which is hay bale tanks that's what you have textile and you're again taking that dirty water from the construction area and then it's being pumped into here which is set away from your stream and from your work area and it's allowed to filter out through the geotextile and the hay bales and then through like a vegetative area before it gets to flow back into the system and lastly we'll talk a little bit about building banks in this photo you can see that they have these wide footers before they start placing their blocks and on the left side they have not placed new riprap or built any banks the right side they have spent a lot of time building the banks so let's go through a couple of those steps again there's your footings for your structure and they've already gotten their first layer foundation rock in place again that rock is being sized based on other key pieces within your stream and so that it is not it's stable at the velocities at at least 100 year storm event that are going through your structure you want to a you want it to be angular you want it to be well graded so that you're filling in those voids with material and then and then you're filling once you've got all your rock in place you're filling in those smaller voids with fine and then you're putting in your next layer of rock and eventually you can have it so that you don't really see all that riprap armor for an engineer that riprap armor is really important for us because we're using it to protect our basements from scour and ice and debris and that type of stuff from the biological side we're also doing that so that we have that connectivity for terrestrial critters up and down stream but we're also using it to create our natural streaming our natural stream channel width through there and we don't end up with you know a shallow cross section you want to have a low flow channel going through here again there's that foundation rock near farms and that's what it looks like when it is finished again continuity upstream and downstream the stream doesn't know that the crossing is there and you know where the stream banks we're matching the natural shape of our channel we're armoring our footings and our abutments against scour and we're allowing for terrestrial critter passage and it's not always you know what we would consider wildlife sometimes it's house cats that are checking things out and you know we want our banks to be connected at all corners so as we come to a close you know we're just kind of giving an overview today and you know it's a lot of information but there's a lot of people out here that have been doing this for a while that you can reach out to and you know we're all very passionate about stream smart and so we want to help you be successful in your future projects just a couple of things to think about you know title streams are a lot more complicated than our typical streams and there's a lot more to think about and when in doubt talk to your local friendly engineer and I'll finish up just showing the five s's again um we want to span that stream we want to set our elevation right your slope and skew matches stream and you've got substrate in there then you will have a successful stream smart structure and you'll be following that goal rule of letting the stream back over stream and with that I will wrap it up thank you Heidi that was fantastic um we are starting to get some some great questions in the q&a and even some in the chat keep it up we are going to keep moving um we just have one last section it's very brief and then we we have a huge chunk of time for questions answers and discussions because I know that some of these questions will will foster some discussion so I am going to wrap us up with a last section on let me share my screen on money okay want to talk a little bit about the costs and benefits of stream smart crossings and we often get to this point and the question that we get is that that all sounds great but how are we supposed to pay for this um if someone mentioned earlier this morning that we're mostly talking about bigger crossing structures right um to to provide the the um the capacity that's needed for these bigger storms and to meet stream smart standards they're going to be bigger than what we've traditionally put in and that's obviously going to cost more especially these days with the material costs being so high and communities and individuals and whoever is is needed to make this crossing often has a very limited budget I know municipalities often have annual budgets and they're they feel like they're trying to decide between whether they plow the roads in the winter or if they're going to be able to put in a stream smart crossing but I'm not sure that's really the the way to think about it because there are resources available and I'll touch on some of those we really need to be thinking a big picture about whether we can afford not to use stream smart design we have to worry about public safety we have economic risks climate change is increasing the risks to our infrastructure we have to worry about maintenance costs that are higher on an undersized culvert and then I will go into some of the opportunities that can help bridge that gap between the cost of a traditional crossing structure and a stream smart crossing structure so when we think about public safety the the first thought is always about that that really obvious threat of a road failure there's an obvious public safety issue there but it's more than just that immediate public safety issue at the crossing if we have to close a road even if it hasn't failed but maybe floods regularly we have to close that road we have to think about all of our emergency vehicles detouring and the fact that individuals and communities can actually be cut off from the rest of the community we a couple of folks have talked about Hurricane Irene I had some friends from Mass Audubon who went up to Vermont for a nice weekend away and they ended up stuck there for two weeks they couldn't get out so it's it happens it's real it can be on a large scale like after Hurricane Irene or just within your community for a handful of households there are also economic costs to um and under having an undersized culvert and the potential for road failure and it isn't just about the cost of replacing that crossing structure having frequent flooding and road failures have bigger costs to the to the whole community if you again have to close a road and you have to have people um detouring around that crossing we're now costing people time money and um and hassle factor basically to get to their jobs to get to the where they need to go if you have customers who are trying to get to your business that can be an issue and you may lose business if you you don't have those functioning the functioning infrastructure that you need if you are a forester and your job is on the other side of that failed road that's a huge economic issue um and over time a flooding actually affects property values within a community so the economic impact of an undersized crossing is not just about the cost of replacing the crossing structure itself. Climate change has come up a couple of times actually and it is folks are starting to actually understand the risk that it poses to our infrastructure um I think Nick mentioned that there was a study that looked back at um annual storms going all the way back to 1948 and they found that since then they've seen a steady increase in the size and frequency of those large annual storms and as you can see from these two maps the biggest increases for both frequency and size of those annual storms has been in the northeast specifically here in Maine the storms are now 23% bigger than they used to be and they're happening 74% more often so they're happening more often and they're bigger when they do happen so we really need to stop building roads like it's 1950 because it isn't anymore and then we need to think about um not just the upfront costs we need to think about the long-term costs of your crossing structures as well and this graph was developed by the nature conservancy it's really to show a comparison of three different crossing types and the cost over time of installing these crossings the the top two the yellow and the red are stream smart crossings the blue one at the bottom is um is a traditional pipe culvert and you can see that the that the pipe culvert is much cheaper for that installation cost much cheaper than the other two the stream smart crossings but you also notice that the stream smart crossings don't have additional costs over time where the pipe does because you're going to have annual maintenance costs even if it's just sending out the DPW crew to clear debris to deal with beavers um you're going to have annual maintenance costs that will increase over time to a point where you will have additional replacement costs for that undersized crossings that you won't have for the stream smart crossings so at the end of 50 years or 75 years the cost of that small pipe is going to be actually higher than the cost of a stream smart crossing but there is financial assistance available and i'll actually run through some of the the potential opportunities that you have um but i do want to run through the fact um that all of these opportunities have some sorts of limitations on them often um it the limit may be on who the opportunity is available to the project proponent maybe has to be a town or can't be a town maybe it has to be a private landowner or a land trust so who the project proponent is is one of the factors the a lot of these opportunities actually look at what aquatic resources are going to be improved whether it's Atlantic salmon brook trout ale wives or all of them together often these are competitive opportunities and having more resource resources that will benefit can actually work in your favor and along with what the resources are the expected improvements are another factor that is considered again particularly for the competitive opportunities how many miles of stream habitat will be restored um whether it's providing access to the ocean access to ponds what species are available and the combination of all of those things together where your project is in the state can determine what opportunities are available to you some agencies and organizations only work in some parts of the states or some opportunities are only available in some parts of the state and then there's also the factor of needing other funds rarely do these opportunities pay for the entire structure you they will often provide the difference between a traditional crossing and a stream smart crossing but you may need to piece together other sources of funding to to complete the entire project and then of course every opportunity depends on what funding is available through that opportunity whether it's that it was a short term opportunity and it's now over or if it's an annual opportunity that has annual budgets that change or whether it's simply the opportunity has been fully expended by the time your project comes up you need to to keep track of of what is available when and finally one of the the big consistencies in all of these opportunities is that most of them require stream smart design to even be eligible to take advantage of these opportunities so it behooves you to to be moving in this direction of using stream smart crossings when you're designing crossings just a few of the resources that are available I actually started with the NOAA grants because it's a reminder to me to share with you all that that the infrastructure bill that passed recently has funding specifically for stream crossings the funding comes in various forms through various agencies and and it hasn't all been it hasn't all come out yet we don't know how much is going to come out how and who's going to be eligible for it but NOAA does have some some grant funding that will be available from this act I believe DOT has received some funding that will help them pick up their backlog of crossings and there will be other opportunities that come out of that act over the next five years actually here in Maine we also have the natural resource conservation program this is a mitigation fund that is developed through or funded through projects that impact aquatic resources and sometimes those funds can be used for roadstream crossing projects that are improving aquatic habitat the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a partners for Fish and Wildlife Program that deals with a lot of different Fish and Wildlife issues but it is aimed at private landowners but that's often an opportunity for funds and then there's a whole list of organizations that that often will have financial opportunities depending on where you are and what resources are available and what they have available sometimes it's the nature conservancy sometimes it's Trout Unlimited Atlantic Salmon Federation the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has had funds that can all be used towards replacing culverts with stream smart crossings but it depends on where you are and what the resources are and what happens to be available at that time these last two we're going to go a little more in-depth I'll talk a little bit about the natural resources conservation service regional conservation partnership program and then we'll actually have John McLean talk about the main DEP stream crossing upgrade grant program the NRCS actually has a couple of different ways that they work to improve aquatic organism passage or AOP on the bottom is information on sort of the standard way that they address crossing structures across the entire state and it's through their EQUIP program the environmental quality incentives program that has an annual allocation that's dependent on the budget every year and it depends on what's been expended already but it is statewide and it's a great opportunity reach out to your local NRCS office for more information but there's another program that is specifically targeting aquatic organism passage and that has a lot of funding available to it and that's been very very successful here in Maine over the last several years and it's the regional conservation partnership program this is the third one that I've been involved in over the last decade or so and this program is what's outlined on the map the area of availability is what's in outlined in red this RCPP is starting this year it's called the watershed scale approach to restoring stream systems they're trying to work on systems instead of just individual culverts around the state there's five million dollars out there to get on the ground to actually replace these crossing structures the nature conservancy is the lead on it this is just a another map of the same program the brown in there shows you the Atlantic salmon distinct population segment and that's why that red outline is what it is it's to capture the Atlantic salmon habitat in particular and so the orange shows the area that for in which you would be eligible it's an RCPP the nature conservancy is the partner but NRCS actually provides the technical and financial assistance for the projects it's targeting primarily private landowners it's a voluntary program the funding is competitive so what resources and what improvements are going to happen are going to be two really key factors it is a flat rate reimbursement they're also doing something a little unusual this time where within the pescatacris watershed they are working with municipalities to help them with their design if there's a municipal crossing that's impeding a system that has other private crossings that NRCS is going to work on so it's a it's a bit more cooperative than it's been in the past it's a five-year program and the goal of this program is to restore 100 stream miles of habitat which seeing what's been done in the last few RCPPs it's it's very likely that that will be successful there are a lot of there's a lot of information on StreamSmartMain.org that's our StreamSmart website and a lot of information there with the specifics on these some of these different programs there was a question in the chat or the Q&A on where to find who to talk to about specific questions and this technical assistance for road crossings is great it gives you contact information for all the different organizations that work with us and what their specialty is what they can help you with you can always call us as well and we can direct you to the right folks but there's a lot of information on funding opportunities at StreamSmartMain.org there's more than just information on funding though and I just wanted to highlight this before I turn it over to John there are videos on within the resource library at StreamSmartMain.org there are videos there are handouts there are links to other resources there's also the information on workshops like the one that we're doing now and I just want to highlight to folks that to to keep an eye on this space in the fall because in October that's when we actually do our hands-on field-based trainings there are two full days where we we work with you both in the classroom and in the field to do some of that stuff that Heidi was talking about taking the the measurements and doing the surveys and with that I'm going to end and I'm going to turn it over to John McLean and he is actually going to talk to us about the DEP Culvert Replacement Grant Program. John you can share your screen. So I actually have to so Sarah did you not get the video? I am so sorry John yes end of the day I am going to John did it the smart way he recorded his talk so I will share that with you and then he's here to answer any questions and there is some really important information in there because if you have used the grant program in the past there are some changes I apologize thank you John let me just pull that up and run it sorry I need to share. Hello everyone my name is John McLean and I run DEP's municipal stream crossing grants program this program has helped with over 15 million dollars for stream crossing upgrades since 2015 opening more than 300 stream miles to fish passage we expect to have at least another year funding for the program some things are changing with the program so I want to take this opportunity to give some basic information that will be useful before the grant application materials become available later this summer this is a competitive grant program which means that we can't award funding to all projects submitted in every round but previous applicants are encouraged to review previous notes and scoring materials and resubmit grants are for a maximum of 125 thousand dollars and scoring is based on how well the project meets program goals given funding source for the upcoming round of grants all projects will have to be complete by December 31st 2024 competitive grant proposal scoring is tied to how well it meets three goals it improves public safety and reduces flooding advances the goals of restoring fish habitat including sea run fish native brook trout and wildlife and the extent to which the proposed project represents an efficient and cost-effective investment there are some pretty big changes on the horizon for this round but these changes are meant to make the process faster allow more municipalities to apply for funding while also ensuring a quality final product there's three million dollars available for the upcoming round instead of asking for plans at the funding stage we'll be asking for commitments to meeting certain performance measures outlined by stream smart standards not reviewing plans at this stage allows for some of the preliminary work to be completed using grant funding we will still require a stream smart longitudinal profile adequate average bank full width measurements to support the structure sizing and final plans as a deliverable of the award contract rather than a submission at the time of the application funding will be made available as these project deliverables are submitted and approved following award this method will also allow for corrections and sizing and design based on better field information and allow payments to be made for some of that investigative and survey work since there are some folks that are likely already thinking about upcoming grants and compiling information this is very important in 2022 we will not be reviewing structure plans as part of the grant scoring we encourage you to use the previous year's application as a guide but for this stage time will be best spent getting good preliminary bank full width measurements and basic desktop level review of the site to qualify projects must be located on a municipal road the existing crossing must also meet our definition of a culvert another area to be aware we are reviewing our definition of culvert and bridge to allow some structures previously disqualified for bringing bridges keep an eye out for that change when the RFP comes out here are some important dates to keep an eye out for we plan to release the RFP in august with proposals likely due in november we hope to speed up the turnaround on awards with the new requirements but announcements would be made in february or march after contracts are in place we can begin paying expenses related to the projects and in july 2023 would be the first in stream work window to complete these projects projects not completed in the first year would need to be completed in the second year to receive funding due to the funding deadline of december 31st 2024 you can find more information about the program previous rounds and find any announcements as the dates are set for the next round on our website scoring information top placing projects and guidance videos are available there as well once again my name is john mclean with main deps stream crossing grants program and nonpoint source training center i'll be around during the q and a if anyone has any specific questions thank you thank you john and sorry if i gave you a moment's heart attack thinking that you had to speak without without your just a little bit sorry a little frantic let me make sure i've got everything closed it needs to be closed and let's actually bring sorry just lost my screen if we can have all of our presenters may become on screen we can do some q and a we actually have a nice check of time here we do have some great questions in the q and a and even in the chat and um i know that some of them may be directed to specific individuals but some of them may also be be questions that that a lot of other people have some input on as well and some of them may actually bring some discussions up not pull the q and a up and some of them have been answered which i think are shared but i think sometimes it's good to actually discuss them as a group too so that we can hear a little bit of back and forth and i think some of the questions were answered in the talks the the questions came up before the they were answered there were there was a question early on about the regulations about whether a NERPA permit is required to replace an existing culvert and we have lost Colin he said he had to leave at 11 30 but he actually put an answer and Anna did as well um the question is does that mean that compliance with stream smart principles is not required is an army core permit required and how about on a private road i will read Colin's answer and i don't know if Anna you want to pipe in with yours um Colin says an army core is still required and the expectation is that stream smart principles are used on a private road same thing core permit required and he actually provides his his contact info and Anna i don't know if you want to pop on and discuss your response sure um so i can't actually see the question or response anymore but essentially when you're looking at the exemption a lot of the exemptions in the natural resources protection act have certain standards that people must follow in order to qualify for the exemption for example with crossings for this exemption um a lot of the standards we have include things like um sort of maintaining a natural stream but either through embedmen or in either through embedmen or having an open bottom structure having that natural stream grade not blocking fish passage either through improper sizing or improper installation so when you look at the standards in that exemption a lot of them actually are similar to stream smart principles therefore even though it's exempt you only qualify for that exemption if you're following those similar principles so hopefully that answers a little bit thanks Anna and i forgot that that you weren't looking at at everything in front of you as well um i don't know if anyone has any other um regulatory or other um thoughts on the um you know the the question comes up a lot what is exempt and what does exempt mean um i don't know tom if you want to i was just gonna call on you to maybe talk about the difference it's a little bit different for the foresters right yeah i'll just remind folks that the question was uh brought up earlier about uh army corps permitting for stream crossings for timber harvesting activities he had said that timber harvesting is exempt for those army corps permitting requirements thanks um and maybe we will stick with um well sort of force your question but not really the question is really about um and i'm going to throw this out to the oh alex i'm going to let you go first well all i wanted to do i think sarah was weigh in really fundamentally about stream smart in that um we do know that the regulations in main uh are not necessarily the strongest they don't always say that absolutely no stream crossing can be replaced without stream smart we know that we have developed this program from the outset as somewhat of a voluntary program we feel so strongly and are so confident that it is the right way to go financially environmentally in every way uh that that we hope folks will accept these principles and move toward them and use them um and because we are fully convinced that they're the best way to go whether or not there are some particular exemptions or regulations don't exactly meet stream smart we feel very strongly that uh that's why we're here today uh to present these ideas to you that we think they're the best the best way to go regardless of what the precise regulatory framework tells you about a certain site thanks alex and i think the the big take home is is if you if you're following stream smart you're probably doing at least what the regulations require and you're probably doing more and you're you're doing something that's actually going to be better for the system um i don't know folks want to weigh in on there was a question about uh some crossings that blew out is that a an unusual storm event or um you know that this is a is when is it how do you recognize that a crossing is still a good crossing or not and Heidi actually went into this a little bit some of the things to look for those four s's right um i think we've gotten very used to seeing crossings done it very traditionally and um i think maybe stream smart crossings are are um something to train our eye to i don't know if anyone wants to jump in on that you know i will sir um with absolutely due respect to um the gentleman came from his name who opposed to some of those issues in somerset county um it is true that when we look at a lot of crossings that were have been out on the landscape for sometimes a really long time and they seem to have been working it just doesn't mean that they're really capable of handling those kind of intense flows and uh i feel confident that the vast vast majority of our stream smart crossings if we follow these principles can absolutely handle the just about the most intense flows that you can possibly imagine some of it is because of what Heidi mentioned we are building these crossings with excess capacity to be able to pass debris during these big storms and that is such a critical factor and there are plenty of folks i won't name names but in the in the stage where we still have standards that say oh you can fill a you can fill a culvert right up you know as long as the road embankment is strong enough you know it can probably handle that well we don't necessarily believe that in stream smart we want to provide lots of extra capacity and so i would submit that those crossings that are out there looking pretty good for the last 20 or 50 years probably aren't actually meeting stream smart standards when it comes down to these kind of intense eight inch rainstorm events thanks alex and then i want to reiterate that um you know storms are getting bigger and they're happening more often so maybe what was okay 50 years ago it's it's in a different world now um it's actually experiencing different energies than than it has for decades i don't know if anyone else wanted to jump in i knew alex would thanks um if not i will actually turn to alex um because you had a couple of questions about the stream table which is always fun to do um whether it could demonstrate other things like the importance of water bars or skid trails and and other things i had someone ask me if it can be used to show the the effects of a dam which would be really cool might want it a little longer or deeper but go ahead alex um it certainly can do some of that i think what in my answer i gave in the q and a to the person who asked that question originally is that water bars and some of those subtle more subtle drainage aspects are probably not the ideal thing for the stream table it is best for showing fairly major dynamics of streams um such as dams for instance that you could certainly mess with dams in it um uh it would take a little bit of you know building of certain little structures that would uh have the show the kind of things that you want to show but certainly it's that kind of thing um that works well the subtle drainage um characteristics that we sometimes need to talk about when we talk about road drainage ditching and um water bars and things like that maybe not so much and tom you had thrown something in the um response as well that maybe sfi is working is looking at this yeah i don't want to speak for anyone but it has been a little project um uh that is that is being undergone right now um some materials are being experimented with i think uh some playdoh is involved uh but we are we are trying some techniques to to show how uh these um how how water flows through a site and how it can be managed at a timber harvesting site to protect water quality uh so hopefully we can get that up and running um you know in the next for foreseeable future i'll say that's pretty exciting i can't wait to see it um we had actually a couple of questions on tidal streams and we're really shifting gears here dramatically um do installations in tidal streams changing preferences in structures alex you jumped in on this one i don't know if anyone else wants to as well we often we used to just have one slide where we said in tidals tidal streams are different and we never talked about it again but um it's something we really need to be talking about um let me first say i'm not a tidal crossing expert necessarily but really fundamentally it's quite obvious that stream smart principles essentially work to a large extent in the tidal environment but really the tidal environment requires such a different level of assessment to be sure that we understand the hydrology which is a having a bi-directional flow and involving potentially big storm surge effects that just are dramatically different than what we deal with um in a standard upland stream crossing that uh it certainly takes different assessment and different thinking and design that doesn't mean though however that the structures necessarily have to be particularly different the answer i gave in the q and a certainly pointed out stream uh steel crossing structures being problematic in the salt environment but otherwise uh it's really often about sizing and about elevation uh more than it is necessarily about the particular type of structure anyone else want to weigh in on tidal structures i know that there is um the the coast wise program that that was mentioned um is hoping to develop a sort of program like stream smart but coast wise but it's more complicated so it's it's a little harder to do and Heidi i saw you come off and i'm actually going to um direct a question at you too um one of the issues i know with with tidal systems and and sort of restoring that flow is um habitats and how they've changed over time and what the impacts are to um to bringing flow back into some of those systems um and i'm pointing it at you um and this can be secondary is that someone had asked about whether you could talk about what changes when maybe we open up an impoundment and restore a stream and how we communicate what that change is going to look like to folks both upstream and downstream but i'll let you jump in on tidal first i was just going to say um following up what alex said about structures is that it's usually the abutment type that is going to change because we're generally dealing with um like marine clays that are poor bearing capacity soils so when we're dealing with tidal situations you're probably going to want to have a more thorough geotech investigation done out there which is automatically going to make food costs so the structuring structure more expensive but ultimately you're setting yourself up for success instead of failure um and i have you know i'm just we're just and our status is just now starting to get into tidal structures um so the habitat benefits um i haven't dealt with a lot but in a freshwater system going from like the dead water um to a natural stream um so that they're matching you know we have to think about the amount of material that potentially is going to come down through and how long it's going to take um and that flushing and um you know and even making sure with you know if and w that taking out a crossing and opening things up that we're not messing with wading bird habitat or we're not we're not now opening a passage for invasive um species that we don't actually want um to be getting up there um but for the most part you know brook trout are are pretty hardy once we open things up um and so you know as soon as as soon as that stream opens up they will start going add one structure that i think that the the brook trout have been upstream downstream had been separated for so long that they were genetically different um and you know we did a full stream restoration and then 15 minutes of opening up that structure i had like a 15 inch brook trout that was literally like swimming making its way i was like all these different like boulder clusters and everything that we installed and watching this brook trout go all the way up um so it really doesn't take them that long to figure things out when you install a stream smart structure i don't know if i answered your question but that's where my brain went yeah that's that's great thanks and alex i'd like to add to that too well i want to add first about another trout the same thing i think Heidi actually mentioned she was showing the an embedded crossing i worked on in the town of nouglas to that i spooked a fox in the week after construction but actually the minutes just like Heidi said the minutes after we opened it up there was an adult brook trout just squirming its way up through the sand there was barely enough water in there yet to get through and yet it it wanted to get through it was just wonderfully uh confirming of what we're doing um but i wanted to speak to the idea that the talking to folks ahead of time i think really is important to understand when you have a fairly disrupted system you've had an impound and upstream of it's large or small often that means there's been some fine sediment stored up upstream and so certainly there's going to be some of that move out and it's something that everyone is a bit concerned about but i think i can say from having done dozens and dozens of these situations that that it often happens so quickly and is very similar in context to having one small bank fail somewhere along the stream which is a totally natural process that happens all the time in streams a little pulse of sediment that comes out and often these situations there was one if you could i could ask you to remember back Heidi showed a couple instances one stream profile of a long long distance of stream profile we did on a very small stream we that had about a three foot what we call a head cut a really steep slope coming from fine sediments that had been stored above the culvert and that just got back down to its natural slope within one or two storms really really quickly and so i think it's important to talk to folks about this and they acknowledge that that's going to happen but that it is pretty painless and not just so disruptive to the stream ecosystem thanks Alex those are both great answers we do need to think about the there will be habitat changes particularly if these these barriers have been there for a long time and then there there's also the the human aversion to change that we will sometimes have to address as well and make sure that communication if you are going to be making big changes like this communicate communicate communicate to your constituents and and to the community it's critically important i wonder if we can chat a little bit about the Heidi mentioned how you want to make sure that you're compacting the soils and i think Alex might have as well in the video so that you don't have your have your stream go subsurface right at your beautiful crossing structure i don't know if anyone wants to talk a little bit about that i've been to a couple of sites where it's a lovely stream it's a lovely crossing and it doesn't look like they're related to each other because the crossing is absolutely dry and then the stream shows up on the other side this might be something that folks aren't thinking about or if you if they are not experienced that this isn't a topic that they know to worry about and Alex i'm going to let you jump in on this because i know that this is something that you have had to deal with in the past yeah sure i think i would not think about it in terms of compaction i i think about compaction of the roadway and the road embankments absolutely and of the fill area up around any kind of stream smart culvert but when i think about the stream bed i think of the opposite of compaction i think about laying it in sort of naturally because what we know is that during large flood events stream bottoms can be mobilized to an extremely great depth we we don't really realize all the time that during those big floods there's hydraulic pressure that goes downward that loosens up gravels and cobbles and all sorts of material even if it doesn't always move out it is sort of mobilized and aquatic critters like to have that looser substrate material for their habitat and we count on it for the evolution of the stream so during those flows some material does move out of a stream smart crossing with the assumption that new material will move in what is key there is that there be enough of fines within that set of substrate material that goes into the stream bed of an embedded crossing or any stream smart crossing that the water flows essentially instantly when we pull cofferdams stop our water control and open the site up for connectivity that the water flow across the surface and we have seen any number of cases where folks thought they were doing a really great job of armoring the stream bed by putting essentially riprap in the bed and maybe even some fine material but not nearly enough so that you had this beautiful flowing stream coming downhill and a beautiful flowing stream actually beyond the culvert downstream but in the culvert the water was going subsurface and that is of course completely defeating the purpose and so it's really important to try to match the natural stream bed in terms of its distribution of substrate both the large materials medium-sized materials but especially those fine materials to be sure that the water actually stays right up flowing where it's supposed to be. Thanks Alex so it's really more about having the glue in there as opposed to packing anything together does anyone else want to jump in on that question or Alex usually covers it pretty well well along the lines of the the bed building we have a question on the the different layers of rocks and finds and rocks and finds is that first layer of foundation rock that armoring piece that's for the at the footers is that necessarily substrate that would match the the substrate characteristics of your stream bit your final stream bed or can that just be riprap to serve that physical function so right so at which layer are you actually worrying about that it matches the stream go ahead Alex. I think the best way to think about this is the the rock that we're layering in to help form the foundations for banks is meant to be stable at virtually all flows we want it to be generally angular and essentially riprap locking together and never really moving and that's so we're doing that to armor the abutments and the footings and so we don't expect to see most of that rock ever at the lower levels as we get up toward the edges of the stream banks that we're building that we will see we're still accepting that we probably have to use angular rock much of the time so that it will lock together better and may not perfectly match the sort of perhaps what might be a much more rounded river stone in the center of the stream that's a little different when we build clusters of rocks perhaps to match what is in the stream or certainly when we build steps as in a step pool environment we want to build those much more out of the local rock or what is very close to the local rock in terms of character but what we do is we want to very carefully install those with foundation rocks and locking them together to be sure they're not going to move because those kind of features are meant to be stable and consistent over time so it's a little bit of a mix of what really fits the character of the stream and what is meant to be truly stable over the long haul thanks alex um sticking with surveys um and and characterizing that that stream bed and banks when you're there are two questions on on serving right one is what's the best time of year to identify that high water line and maybe someone can talk about the difference between the water line and and that bank full width and what those you know whether the time of year is relevant or not except maybe in snow cover and then the other question is how far apart should your cross sections be is there a rule of thumb for something like that um I don't know who wants to jump in first if Heidi you want to start so I would say that the best time of year to survey is before the leaves are out or when the leaves are off and when the bugs are the leaf is the best time to survey um usually that does not happen but one can hope um and as far as defining your you know where the bank full flow is and your water line it doesn't really matter um if you're out there when that is actually happening again that bank full flow that is happening every 1.2 to 1.5 years depending on who you're talking about there's indicators um you're out there to tell where that is so your bank full flow um that bank full width is generally where you see that divide between your woody vegetation and your like grasses because that that bank full flow that's your channel forming flow so it's not giving that woody vegetation time to actually start sprouting um but you can also I mean sometimes you can see you know where ice was or you know you could see scars on trees you can see where uh fines were deposited there's a lot of things that you can see when you're outside um to try to see you know where that bank full width is and if you have 50 people outside taking bank full width I guarantee you will have 50 different bank full width measurements um people might even disagree down to the inch just because they want to be right so that's just bank full widths are they are they're critical but they're difficult um so so going into multiple parts of your stream of data such as this one um and then I mean the water line for me is really you know you have your top of bank and then you know where the water is starting at your time of supply and some of those profiles I showed you there we had the water depth going down through there and so that's more just for your survey um to indicate one of it I'll let Alex follow up on that oh thanks that was great Heidi I would agree with all of that I think that bank full width question is certainly always a big one and that's why we take so many of them right and average them hopefully so that you come out with some better sense of overall for the particular site I would speak I guess I'll speak specifically to the cross section question we typically take one representative cross section upstream of the crossing and one downstream that's kind of our normal run of things and that's partly because we have a pretty good sense of reading the topography the the stream morphology and so have a good sense of where to do those it's really important of course when you get back to the office and you're doing design work that those cross sections you've taken are pretty good representations of the kind of either the same as where you're going to be replacing the crossing or at least on two different ends of the spectrum so that you can kind of match between a slightly steeper upstream section and a slightly less steep downstream section that really the slope needs to match the character needs to generally match so you need to be a little bit careful about where you pick to do those cross sections and that's why one of the great processes of scoping out a site is to take a bunch of bank full width measurements and start to read the stream and then as you're doing that and maybe even start your stream profile then you'll get a sense as you move along where the best perhaps most representative sites within that profile are to do those cross sections. That's Alex and of course that scoping piece is really important because you need to have a general idea of your bank full to figure out how far up and down you're going to go so you're going to want to be keeping training your eye to that as you're scoping out your entire stream system to get that information. Great question on water diversion which I know is a topic that can be difficult sometimes do you need to divert water when installing an open bottom culvert or bridge and this may be it depends I don't know if anyone wants to jump in with some exciting examples. Sometimes it's so dry you know we're in a drought cycle so sometimes there's not any water during that low flow season that we're actually doing construction but we're not usually that lucky so you have to have those contingency plans in place to keep clean water clean and dirty water go somewhere else. I would add yeah I think well I've had several good examples of sites that where we had no water we felt really lucky that there was virtually no water there so it made our lives really easy but construction takes a week or two weeks in my case sometimes and rain came as it so often does and so you absolutely have to have those pumps on hand the pump through the backup pumps available all the setup that you planned for needs to be there you cannot count on having a dry site there's just no way you can do that so you really need to have those plans in place. Thank you. An interesting question is there a velocity range a specific velocity range that you're looking for that's appropriate for aquatic organism passage? Any of the fish bios or other wildlife biologists out there? I guess I'll jump in real quick. I see Alex put in a pretty good answer to that one already too and the short answer is just it depends on the organism fish are a lot you know better at getting up a stream than an insect or an invertebrate or something like that but it's also worth remembering that even within fish you know it can depend on the different life stages. I've seen a lot of studies that for juvenile salmonas like a brook trout or a salmon you know flows down to one cfs or half a cfs can sometimes be an impediment so it can be pretty low so it really just it depends on what's present and you know just the type of the crossing that we're dealing. I want to add thanks Nick that's great I don't know enough about the needs of so many individual species I think what I was curious about and thinking through that answer that I gave in the Q&A was thinking about what I do as a designer to try to think about velocity and that's really about the big storms and the scour that comes with those big storms and when I see the models that we run to look at the hydraulic capacity and hydraulic dynamics of our planned stream crossings I am always happy that the kind of velocities we're looking at may not be great for fish passage or may not certainly not may not be good for a number of other aquatic organisms but it's important for folks to know that critters are generally not trying to move during those storms they are simply trying to survive they're trying to hunker down and hold on and wait for it to pass but what we do know from these kind of looking at these velocities is that the scour forces that work during those big storms in a stream smart crossing are phenomenally different dramatically different I would say totally different than in a hydraulically designed traditional culvert and that makes me feel good and I can tell you that you know the the poor wood turtle that was killed on the road wood turtles will use streams for movement and banks they will move within the stream itself they also when we get those big storms they try and hunker down and sometimes they end up washed down if they don't hit a a culvert that is that is damned up they can often survive and that is a part of the redistribution of the population and the expansion of populations and so when we have a free flowing stream these critters can often survive some of those big events and it can actually lead to some some new movements and new territories and so it that answer is it depends and that's why we need to let the stream act the way that it wants to that it would naturally on the landscape so that it it can act the way that all the critters can who have evolved with it can respond accordingly we have an interesting question about the role of towns for instance in regulations so here's some good regulations questions and what can be done besides these wonderful stream smart workshops to help towns understand projects that are going to benefit that are different right towns can be used to doing things the the usual way are there does anyone have any suggestions beyond this obviously bringing everyone to our workshops to help bring towns along and what their role is in the regulatory process for approving crossings and stream smart and what what the what the local role is it's probably going to be a state person that needs to respond to that I'll offer a quick one money usually helps I was just going to say excellent answers any other suggestions on obviously my recommendation is always to send them to our trainings send them to us we can provide materials and resources and I would like hopefully I would offer that that if you all are here you are probably willing and able to and available to chat with towns and help them understand is there any key piece that you have seen that any of you on the panel have seen make that aha moment for towns consistently that that you think is a good one to recommend to folks well it's just as Zach mentioned with regards to looking at towns that have used previous or that have previously installed stream smart crossings and using them as examples there are a ton of examples that you can share with your select board or otherwise and showing how these crossings have not only improved safety for the towns that people there have enabled commercial businesses to stay open more and things like that but have also saved the town's money in the long run as Sarah mentioned before just a massive amount of money in maintenance in preventing blowouts again and again there's numerous success stories that you can share and look for and there's I think a few different sites that have these examples available for you to look at to and share and discuss with people but definitely as John said before the money is can be definitely key not only the short term in applying to different grants and things like that but also that monetary saving the long term and again it is also can be a safety issue too so and I would not shy away from I mean I love the the money idea and in fact I can't believe well I guess I believe there's still towns in Maine who don't realize what a fantastic program the DEP has to help them and how relatively easy it is to apply so I hope towns that haven't really explored that will can will think about that if they're listening and watching but I would never shy away from the long term financial benefits of StreamSmart I think you laid it out Sarah it is absolutely true and so I would make that this a purely financial argument to the town to the select man that this is absolutely to the benefit of the town in the long run in terms of diminishing maintenance costs and replacement costs absolutely regardless of the other wonderful benefits StreamSmart crossings give I've also found kind of in talking to municipal folks that one of the the discussions that seems to always come up that that those folks view as positive as you can say you know essentially we do it this way and none of us will ever have to talk about this thing ever again we're never going to have to come up with a plan you know the fact that the next time that this structure needs any attention we're all going to be gone so you know that is it seems to be something that comes up on a lot of projects that well at least we're never going to have to talk about this again I like that I like that we just have a couple more minutes I'm not sure if I have gotten all of the questions that are here if anyone sees anything I've missed and otherwise I don't know if any folks any of the panelists have questions for each other because I know that there were a couple of back and forths with different between different panelists anyone want to share any of those back and forth or questions go ahead Tom yeah just a quick one I'm wondering how accurate your findings stream stats estimates of bank full width compared to onsite measurements oh Alex this is great thanks Tom so I I don't know how many of the viewers won't really want to get into stream stats at all but it's really important to note I think for anybody who does or thinks about it at all so this is hydrology this is how much water we expect to come to a site given its drainage area and some other characteristics that USGS stream stats gives us and USGS works really hard to try to evaluate and study these things and come up with better estimates it's all statistics basically or a lot of it is statistics and they just switched the fundamental paper that they used to define small drainage area discharges or flows in very recent time so they went from a 2015 paper to a 2020 paper and I found on sites that didn't have a lot of wetlands upstream that it really changed the estimates and really gave a lot more higher flows coming down and so that made me totally change my design work at the same time they've also added a lot more estimates of bank full width unfortunately the range of estimates that they give are just gigantic they'll go for a for a small relatively small stream they'll say well it could be six feet could be 20 can't tell you so it's really unclear unfortunately we have one pretty good sort of regression equation that we use for relating the drainage area the area where water flows down to that stream crossing just bank full width and it really is only good for beyond three square mile drainage areas and so a ton a ton of drainage area a ton of stream crossings that we replace in Maine on town roads and private roads and whatnot are in that less than three square mile area and so there is a regression equation that USGS developed with some of us a bunch of us involved and I find it fantastic but they haven't published it yet so it's not available I use it I'd even happy to give it to you I'll put it in the in the Q&A actually for folks to use because I find it phenomenally accurate and so I would rather use that than anything that comes out of stream stats because often the one that comes in stream stats is bright orange you've seen it in the reports perhaps and it tells you be careful this is not really right it is always too small and so it gives people a false sense of confidence that if stream stats tells them it's a 10 foot stream I would bet it's 12 13 feet in many cases and so obviously that's going to mean a different size structure and so I wouldn't count on stream stats to give a really great answer thanks great question great answer thank you and we are at the end of time and not not for all time just for this workshop and Alex I can actually share that we're going to send the evaluations out to everyone and we'll send links to resources and we can include that in our resources I want to thank everyone for being here both attendees and panelists I know this is a big chunk of your day hopefully you've gotten you've taken something away from it and thanks again to all the panelists for being here and we'll see you out on the streams Sarah there was a question that came in about certificates for attendance that I wanted to maybe jump on as everyone's leaving yeah so this class does count for continuing education credits for certified contractors in erosion control and for those folks I think the best way is just to get in touch with me directly yeah we will actually be creating certificates of attendance for the DEP program for engineers can get some CEU's forced SAF gives credits as well so we will provide everyone with certificates for attendance all right on that thank you all see you