Another weekend, another storm doing a number on town roads. Just ask Leo Aucoin.
“Putting it all back together every Monday gets old,” said Aucoin, highway superintendent for the town of Henniker, which took the brunt of the early weekend storm.
“A little after five Friday night, I was looking at the weather report, saw the storms are starting to train up and coming right at us,” he said. “West-to-east flow [of storms] is better than a south-to-north flow. When they’re training up out of the south, they’re slow-moving and they’re steady. And everything’s so saturated, it didn’t take long for the rain to get things going; the brooks were instantly flowing.”
Henniker and Hillsborough appear to be the two towns hardest hit by the latest storm in this wet season, which dropped up to 6 inches of rain from Friday night through Saturday. A number of roads in both towns were temporarily closed due to high water.
As of Monday morning in Hillsborough, the dirt section of Bible Hill Road is still closed, and Old Henniker Street at Preston Street is closed due to needed repairs.
All roads in Henniker are passable, although some were not yet fully opened.
“There are no closed roads but we are doing shoulder repair,” said Aucoin. “I thought we did pretty well, we’ve put a lot of effort into improving them… You identify where that water’s coming from and you establish what you can do to… minimize the next event that comes down the line.”
One culvert on Gould Pond Road washed out, “but it was scheduled for replacement anyway,” he said.
Half of Henniker’s 100 miles of town roads are dirt roads, which tend to be more affected by strong rainstorms.
“They’ve all got at least one lane open. Some of the back roads are just 18 feet [wide], so making it passable for one lane is something,” said Aucoin.
He noted that, with storms like last weekend’s, there’s an element of luck, pointing to neighboring Deering: “Deering got slammed the week before – this time it just missed him.”
The Concord area saw about nine inches of rain in May, which is more than triple the amount during the same time last year.
