The sun shines on the sinkhole on March 17th
after a long destructive winter.
Last month the city of Easthampton applied for a loan of $450,000 from Massachusetts’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund to repair the Manhan Rail Trail. The role of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund Program is to extend loans with low interest rates to communities that demonstrate a critical need for drinking water or wastewater-related infrastructure projects. This creative application has not gone unnoticed by local critics of the rail trail.
But the decision to apply for money from the state, just five days after the economic stimulus bill passed last month, speaks to the town’s desire to resolve the growing issue while the weather and economic climate are favorable. It also signifies the town’s disappointment with the pace of Governor Deval Patrick’s deliberations on a proposal to spend $3.1 of the state’s $11.7 billion dollar share of the federal economic stimulus bill on rail trail renovations throughout the state. Northampton’s Mayor Mary Clare Higgins first submitted the sweeping proposal to repair and link rail trails across the state at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington D.C. in January. Massachusetts has the highest density of rail trails in the country and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has been the principle owner of unused railways in the state for decades.
Friends of Manhan’s Craig Della Penna speculates that a majority of Manhan’s construction costs will come from transporting workers and materials to the isolated work site half a mile down a trail designed to exclude large vehicles, and more recently even all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles. The plan is to acquire permits to fill the sinkhole, rebuild embankments, restructure a more stable concrete drainage tunnel, and dredge out all of the material that washed into the river.
The last undertaking is critical as the town is primarily eligible for a loan from the Clean Water Fund, at two percent interest, because the material that washed into the river presents a health risk due to it’s proximity to a sanitary sewer line that parallels the trail. The possibility remains that Deval might use stimulus money to replenish the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and thus enable it to offer a zero percent loan to Easthampton instead, so proponents are watching the governor closely. Easthampton Department of Public Works has also come under increased scrutiny as the questions have been raised by town officials and citizens as to whose responsibility is it to inspect what are referred to as “alternate transportation corridors” or rail trails? And how was a grey area in safety regulation allowed to form and remain for half a decade?
The Manhan Rail Trail where it passes under Park Street,
3 miles away from the sinkhole, is still in use and very
popular on a sunny weekday.
The costly damage done to the drainage system began last September when stones dislodged from a drainage tunnel running under and perpendicular to the trail, blocking the flow of rain water through the drain. Early December’s persistent rains and tepid temperatures created an acute need for drainage and eventually caused a segment of the trail to slide away leaving behind a hazardous 25 foot deep, 15 foot wide sinkhole that has since then double in width and deepened slightly with the formation of a vernal river that travels down to join the nearby Oxbow river, a subsidiary of the Connecticut River.
At the southern most part of the former railway,
south of South Street, an existing concrete
and metal pipe culvert, or drainage tunnel,
remains functional.
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