Vermont Flood: Picking Up The Pieces Once Again And Why It Happened

The city of Montpelier, Vermont posted to Facebook this
 photo of rising water in the downtown Montpelier. The
water stopped short of flooding ground floor shops this 
time, but I'm sure many businesses suffered flooded
and damaged basements. 

The storm that caused our latest Vermont flood disaster is pretty much over early this Tuesday morning. We're waiting for the last of the rivers to reach major flood crest, and then it's time to once again, start cleaning up. 

That's true in Vermont and in nearby areas. Other areas, like New Hampshire, western Maine and parts of New York also had devastating floods Monday. 

Pretty disheartening, huh?

The extent of the damage from this flood is just starting to be assessed, but there's a lot of it, judging just from the photos I've seen from Vermont news outlets and in social media. 

Some examples: WPTZ TV had video last night of inundated Elm and Randall streets in Waterbury last evening. The houses in that neighborhood were damaged in July's flood. They've just barely cleaned up and now Winooski River water reached similar heights, damaging those homes again. 

I suspect there might have been some additional damage in homes along Route 2 between Waterbury and Richmond.

Some businesses along Main Street in Barre which were damaged in July's flood got hit again, too. I don't think the damage is as had this time, but how the hell do you recover from floods that hit twice in five months?

Early this morning, the Winooski River at Essex Junction was just about reaching its major flood crest of 21 feet, just two feet lower than the epic floods of July. This will be the sixth highest crest on record along the Winooski River at that spot. 

The Lamoille River in Johnson reached major flood
stage overnight, achieving its fourth highest 
crest on record. 

Montpelier had a better time at it with this storm than in July, which basically destroyed the downtown. 

This time, the Winooski River flooded parking lots near downtown and probably got into downtown basements, But the streets of downtown Montpelier stayed above water, except near the Bailey Avenue and Taylor Street bridges.  

The Mad and Lamoille Rivers also achieved major flood stage. The Lamoille River at Johnson crested overnight at 17.58 feet, the fourth highest level on record there. Minor to at most moderate flooding had been forecast. Clearly, things really took a turn for the worse Monday. 

 WHY IT HAPPENED

All possible forces came together to make Monday's Vermont flood as bad as possible. The storm's orientation was elongated south to north, an arrangement that ensured heavy rain would fall for many hours. More hours than you'd expect from such a fast-moving storm. 

Complete data is not in yet, but many, many spots in Vermont had more than two inches of rain, with some areas up over three inches. I see reports of 3.3 inches in Johnson, 3.13 inches in Bolton, 2.9 inches in Quechee and 2.8 inches in Waitsfield.

It seems that much like in July, the heaviest rain was oriented along the Green Mountains, ensuring that water would rush downhill along the steep terrain to flood the valleys below.

Before the storm, an unusually high amount of snow for this early in the season had accumulated at mid and high elevations. The snow was wet and heavy, with an abnormally high water content. 

The storm was accompanied by record high temperatures. Montpelier, for instance, had a high Monday of 59 degrees, shattering the old record high for the date of 50 degrees.  

The Winooski River at Essex Junction reaching a major
flood crest early this morning. It looks like it will
be the sixth highest flood there on record.

Worse, the air was very humid.  The higher the dew point, the more humid the air. 

Dew points were in the 50s for much of Monday.  Such a dew point is often seen in July, not December, and these are some of the highest winter dew points I've ever seen. 

The higher the dew point, the more readily and easily snow melts. As it was raining hard, the snow was rapidly melting.  It basically added an inch or so to the rainfall that did occur.

The rain couldn't soak into the ground, either. In some places, the ground was partly frozen, so the water couldn't percolate into the ground. 

 In many other places, the ground was saturated after our ultra wet summer, a soggy October, and a very wet December leading up to Monday's storm. 

And of course there's climate change. It's making storms stronger and more erratic.  It's obviously warming the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water. Under the right conditions, like on Monday, that extra atmospheric moisture can be released as downpours. Storms are becoming wetter, which helps explain the increasing frequency of floods in Vermont. 

After Sunday night and Monday's storm, which dumped 2.45 inches of rain on Burlington, the total for the month so far there is 5.09 inches. So far, that makes it the fourth wettest December on record   Those records go back to the 1880s. 

Also, if not one more raindrop or snowflake lands on Burlington, this year will have produced 44.09 inches of rain in Burlington, which would make it the seventh wettest year on record. (There's no chance of Burlington reaching a record wet year, because that mark is 50.92 inches in 2011).

The year 2011 was also marked with repeated flood disasters in Vermont, including Tropical Storm Irene.

 WHAT'S NEXT?

A welcome break, to be blunt. 

Some rain was again moving into parts of Vermont before dawn, but don't worry. It's light, harmless stuff. And it's going to change to snow.

There might be some snow showers around that briefly come down sort of heavily. The snow showers won't last long enough to pile up to any great depth, but could cause slick roads and poor visibility at times. Especially since temperatures will be slowly falling all day. Temperatures will dip below freezing in many areas by mid-afternoon.

The weather is looking mercifully quiet through Christmas. A weak system could dust us with snow showers, or dampen us with light rain showers on Saturday, but it will be no big deal. Temperatures will be near normal, but trending upward toward milder than average by Christmas Day.

To add insult to injury after this latest Vermont weather disaster, much of the state will not see a white Christmas this year. 

The next chance of any kind of larger storm is around December 27 or 28, but of course that is a very iffy forecast. If a storm does come along then, I have no idea whether it would be snow, rain or a mix, or how much precipitation we get out of it. 

 ,  .