The first day of school for students in Southbury went on as normal Tuesday in a town that was ravaged by last week’s devastating floods.
With many roads and bridges destroyed, the school district had to rework bus routes. Bus drivers even drove the routes over the weekend to ensure the roads were safe to carry students on, opting for smaller buses in hard to maneuver areas.
“It takes 4 to 6 weeks to build bus runs -- we did it in three days,” said Joshua Smith, superintendent of Regional District 15 Schools. “Our drivers have been driving these roads for a lot of years so we trust them when they say, this shoulder is a little soft, left turn here not a right turn.”
Smith said the district serves 3,400 students across Southbury and Middlebury. He said Middlebury’s roads didn’t sustain damage during the storm and students there were not impacted.
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He commended the work of Southbury’s crews who quickly repaired roads and allowed students to get back to some normalcy.
“They’ve literally repaved and rebuilt roads in a week,” he said. “There’s some families we have challenges -- they have to kind of get to the end of a street or somewhere we can meet them, but for the most part, our buses ran, teachers are in schools, students are learning just how it’s supposed to be.”
Southbury First Selectman Jeff Manville said many crews worked long hours, some even clocking 100 hours of overtime last week.
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“I’m amazed at the progress our Public Works Department has made. The coordination is unbelievable. The crews are working quite a few hours,” he said.
Moving forward, he said he wants to rebuild the town’s roads and bridges to withstand floodwaters in case another devastating event like this happens again.
“We can have another storm in another 6 weeks, another 6 months, I don’t know. This was unexpected. I don’t want to have to redo and redo again if it’s weakened. I would prefer to build back to resiliency,” Manville said.
