Main Street in St. Johnsbury is a mess these days, as workers tear up the pavement to replace an outdated water system.
The construction will run right past the Fairbanks Museum, just in time to make travel tough for summer visitors.
But the museum is turning a bane into a benefit.
Adam Kane had just accepted the director’s job at Fairbanks when he got the bad news. Come spring thaw, the road in front of the historic landmark was to become a construction site where heavy machines would create months of dust, commotion, and traffic jams. At first, Kane was worried about losing visitors.
“But then, you know, as I thought about it and as the staff talked about it, it really became clear that this was just a great opportunity,” Kane said. "We’re a science museum. We teach science, and a construction project, when you boil it down, it allows you to teach. Almost any avenue of science you want to go after is presented in a construction project.”
So Kane rounded up some donors, raising so far almost 80 percent of the $178,000 needed for what the museum is calling “Water Works: The Science Under St. Johnsbury.”
The award winning illustrator David Macaulay is working on a huge mural to show how underground water systems work. Outside the museum, kids will be able to pump water into a barrel and then into a sand erosion table, to show how water affects land. Other exhibits linked to the planetarium will explore water in outer space.
Back on earth, tour guides will take visitors right to the site where the new water system is being installed. Site superintendent Greg Monty explains the system:
“We’re putting in new water, new sewer, and new storm drain mainly so that the sewer and the water are separate," he says. "Because now they run together, and in a storm event it’s more water than the sewer plant can handle. The combined stuff goes where you don’t want it to.”
Namely, into the Passumpsic River.
Meanwhile, inside, school groups are already learning about the machines they gawked at on the way in the door. Teacher Leila Nordmann switches on a contraption that makes simple gears whirr.
"I want you guys to watch it for 30 seconds or so, see what you notice," she tells the kids as they watch, wide-eyed.
In nearby hallways glass cases hold delicate natural history artifacts that could be damaged if the old building vibrates when the excavation reaches its doorstep in a few weeks. Director Adam Kane will then dispatch eagle-eyed observers.
“So as soon as the construction gets here we’ll be in a daily monitoring regime where we’ll have staff go around every day and look at all of the artifacts on all of the different shelves, thousands and thousands of them, to make sure things aren’t moving and things aren’t going to topple over," Kane said.
He’s especially worried about what he calls “bug art”— elaborate mosaics made entirely from the fragile body parts of tiny insects. Those glass cases are being re-mounted to absorb shock.
And eventually, The Fairbanks Museum hopes to produce printed materials that will help other museums or schools along other construction sites make the most of a bad situation.
