Norwich Public Works director inspecting roads on foot
Norwich — Public Works Director Ryan Thompson started pounding the pavement this week, with a plan to jog “every mile of city-owned and -maintained roadway” to find out first-hand where the potholes are, clogged drains, blight problems, overgrown weeds and maybe where sidewalks are needed.
“When I started out, I didn’t plan this at all,” said Thompson, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. “I’m a reservist. I have to keep in shape. I’ve been running since I came back from deployment (in Iraq this spring). I’ve been running around Norwichtown, the same route, and it started getting boring. So (Tuesday), I thought I should do a different route, and picked it out of the blue.”
He jogged from his home on the Norwichtown Green up Mediterranean Lane, portions of Wightman Avenue, Scotland Road, Case Street, West Town Street, East Town Street and Huntington Lane. He stopped short when he saw two recently installed catch basins cracked and showing “compaction failure.”
Back at the office, his detailed spreadsheet would show those as new, with no reason to expect a problem. Thompson already has dispatched public works street division crews to fix the defect.
“And I thought, ‘I should do this across the entire city, and encourage other people to do it, too,’” Thompson said.
He ran 5.8 miles on Wednesday, including 4.4 miles of city streets and 1.4 miles of state roads.
Thompson is tracking his progress on the Public Works Department Facebook page, listing the streets he has traversed and various observations.
For example, both Mediterranean
Lane and Sturtevant Street are in “bad shape,” he wrote, but Mediterranean will be repaved this fall, while Sturtevant is not on the paving list. Referring to that trusty street matrix, he learned that Sturtevant hasn’t been paved since 1954 and hasn’t been serviced since 1967.
“It is quickly rising and will be paved in the coming seasons,” Thompson wrote of the paving priority list.
Thompson will jog in the early mornings before work or during his lunch hour — not on city work time, he said — and plans to do at least two or three miles per trip.
On Friday, he parked at the Friendly’s Restaurant on West Town Street and headed down Sholes Avenue for a planned 3.3-mile route along several residential streets near the Yantic River. He didn’t mind the light drizzle.
Thompson plans to continue his regular jogs as time and work schedules allow through fall and into winter, weather permitting. He doesn’t mind running in the cold or rain, but will draw the line at icy, slippery or snowclogged roadsides for safety reasons.
He also wants to encourage Norwich residents either to take to the streets themselves or join him if they see him jogging through their neighborhoods in the coming weeks.
“That’s kind of the intent,” Thompson said. “I just want to get a real sense of the city. I’ve looked at all these roads mathematically. We have a miraculous spreadsheet that has all this stuff on it. But that’s not the same.”