Riverside Avenue Topography

Burlington's Riverside Avenue is a curving roadway into Winooski, home to prolific landslides. As visible in the timeline above, these events began following the development of the roadway at the beginning of the 20th century, the most significant landslides during that century occurring in 1955, 1959, 1968, 1977, and 1981. The site's most recent washout came on Halloween in 2019 during an intense storm.

Heavy development of the area began in 1931, with wooden scaffolding and sand filler along the road, installed to widen the drivable street for traffic. These structural changes to the land, in addition to the extreme deforestation that accompanied them, left the ground unstable and the area vulnerable to dramatic erosion events. In the latter half of the century, much of the area development was to add housing. With these developments came further attempts to stabilize the bank alongside the road, this time with stone and sand.