This past spring we had a serious storm (that I missed because I was in Virginia for a seminar). It caused some flash flooding, and washed out several roads. Some of these roads are Town maintained and some are village maintained. Well the village has no money for maintenance and its roads were already in bad shape before this storm hit. In fact, you could identify the village/town line just by the repair of the roads. What’s even funnier is that early this year they put up a “you are entering the village of” sign and it was exactly at the point where the road goes to crap. Anyway, we don’t officially live in the village of Fleischmanns; we just use them for our mailing address since it has the closest post office. We do have to drive through Fleischmanns to get to most of the places we go. There is one road in particular that is somewhat narrow that was hit very hard by the storm. Just about all the way down one side the pavement was washed out leaving 8-12 inch wide gaps and in places the trench was as deep as 12-18 inches. With the wash out the road would only support one car at a time, and the village didn’t do anything about it for several months (due to lack of funds I assume).

Recently some genius (or should I say village idiot) got the idea to fill in the trench with gravel, which at least allowed for two cars to make it on the road at the same time. However, if we can get rain that is powerful enough to wash away a paved road, what made this guy think that gravel would have the slightest chance of maintaining position during a downfall? As it turns out we had a pretty good storm last week and all of the gravel ended up at the bottom of the road, so now we are back to big trench in the road with room for only one car to pass.

This aught to be quite fun once snow season starts.