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| Somebody's little piece of Vermont heaven was trashed by the raging Huntington River on July 11. Similar scenes - many much worse than this, were once again common across Vermont this month. |
We spent the day this July 11 marking the first anniversary of one of the worst flood on record in Vermont by....... picking up the pieces after another deadly Vermont flood.
It does seem like it's harder and harder to catch one's breath between new weather extremes. Flooding after July 10, 2023 continued sporadically through the rest of that month and on into August.
Last year's summer disaster was followed by more rough, scary, disheartening weather. We had another destructive flood in December, twin windstorms that spread further damage in January, and severe thunderstorms and flash flooding in central Vermont just on June 23 -less than month ago.
And never mind the other extremes that didn't cause so much harm but had us weirded out: The hottest October day on record, the warmest winter on record, and damaging wet snowstorms in December and April. It goes on and on.
This year, the subsequent series of storms following July 10 haven't been as damaging as last year's.
So far, anyway.
A RECKONING
A year after the July, 2023, and just before the torrents hit again earlier this month, Vermont looked largely tidied up.
A snippet of a Carly Simon lyric pops into my head here, "Close the wound, hide the scar." The line from the song is about emotionally wounded people putting on a brave face.
Which is where I think Vermont was on July 9. And maybe will be again this time next year.
Behind closed doors, people were still still living in homes whose insides are still had not been repaired. Business owners and home owners teeter on the edge of financial ruin from the flood's cost. Farmers, always on the edge and at the mercy of the weather more than pretty much all of us, wonder if they will make it.
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| A sign outside a church in flood-ravaged Johnson, Vermont in July, 2023 |
People like this are out of the headlines, except of course when we're marking the anniversary of the disaster.
The Associated Press's profile of one woman's current life a year after the flood is pretty harrowing. I'm stressed out just reading it.
"Lisa Edson Neveu and her two teenage sons still live in their flood-wracked home, despite unrepaired damage that festers like an open wound: Torn-out walls and floors, a missing ceiling in one room and a downstairs bathroom that is no more. The family's kitchen was destroyed, so they cook meals on an outdoor grill, an electric frying pan and an air fryer."
The immediate aftermath wasn't the real problem. Neighbors helped neighbors, the National Guard really stepped up to the plate. But then that was it.
They were on their own to fight insurance companies, the adjusters, FEMA, state and local regulations, you name it. A Vermont flood typically comes and goes in a day. The aftermath lasts forever.
At least Neveu didn't have to start from square one with murky water in her house again. Montpelier avoided another calamity this time.
Not so in Barre. Or Waterbury. Or other towns victimized again the night of July 10-11. I heard one clip on the radio of somebody in Barre saying they hadn't finished cleaning up the debris from the July 2023 flood when this one hit.
The sudden transition from Vermonter living in a paradise to a climate victim has to be one of the most disorienting things out there.
VTDigger told us about Sequin Skye, a hospice nurse who lives - or at least lived - in an apartment building on Great Brook in Plainfield.
The flooding covered her floor in silt. She didn't know which belongings she'd be able to save. A porch she loved sitting out on was in ruins. It was a piece of paradise before Wednesday night.
"I swear to you, it was like a babbling brook. And I sat and drank coffee yesterday on my little porch, listening to the brook and being so happy." Now, everything was covered with dirt and mud, and it now "looks like some kind of desert."
The joy Skye experienced before the flood is shared by most Vermonters. For me, there's nothing better than sitting in this deep tub we put out on our lower deck. I fill it with cool water. On muggy evenings, I just sit there, watching the flowers bloom, absorb the deep, deep green of a Vermont summer, and wonder what all the birds are gossiping about.
It's a moment of calm and respite for my chaotic brain. But now, other thoughts intrude on the peace.
I wonder, when will the other shoe drop? When will climate change directly intrude into this placid life?
Of course, it already has intruded. You can't escape thinking about the plight of your neighbors who have been hit hard, nor should you. Storm warnings seem to carry more weight now. Will the next storm be the literal homewrecker? It seems you never know nowadays.
BARRE
Speaking of homewreckers, what about the fate of communities that have been hit hard over and over again. Places like Barre.
Can a town like that survive after two big flood disasters in a year? Plus having endured flooding last December? I'm also not sure everyone in Barre recovered from two big floods in 2011.
Visitors flock to the picture perfect Instagram ready villages in Vermont, but the Green Mountain State is also home to a lot of working class towns. Ones with even less money to throw around than the pretty but still cash-strapped tourist destination towns.
Like Barre.
I can't be the only thinking along these lines. Heck, even the Washington Post quoted me when I wrote last week, "I honestly don't know how Barre will recover from two devastating floods in one year."
The city is losing housing and population from the flooding, yet other people are trapped in flood-prone houses, because they are not eligible for buyouts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a program that provided money to towns so they can buy up properties in flood prone areas. In many cases, those purchased homes are torn down and the area they once occupied becomes green space such as parks.
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| Rain pours down in Montpelier, Vermont and flooding shown just beginning on July 10, 2023. About 90 minutes after this photo was taken, virtually all of downtown Montpelier was under water. With all of our disasters in mind, we now get nervous with every torrential downpour. |
Barre received 62 applications for buyouts, but could only approve 20, because that's all the money that was available
It almost seems as if Barre won't entire die from all these floods because some people have nowhere else to go.
It's not as if Barre is full of millionaires. VTDigger profiled one family whose Barre home was damaged three times by flooding in the past year. Each time, their basement filled up with water and pollutants. They applied for a buyout, but were denied. For now, anyway, Barre is only accepting buyouts for houses nearest the flood prone Stevens Brook.
Everybody in Barre, whether they suffered flood damage or not, is in a bind because of these repeated climate related disasters.
"Barre 'can't afford to buy houses for people not along the river,' according to (City Manager Nick Storellicastro, because property bought out with FEMA funds must become permanent green spaces. The city simply can't lose more housing space, according to Storellicastro, nor can the city's budget - already 'in dire straits' from last summer's flood - absorb any further loss of property tax revenue."
So where does that leave Kate O'Day, her husband Nick Roos and their baby daughter, the family profiled in VTDigger?
On top of not qualifying for a buyout, around last Christmas they also received notices from the city that they must elevate their house somehow, and also bring utilities up from the basement to meet fresh city codes.
"And the couple wonders: Who's going to want to rent or buy a house in a floodway, with an unusable basement that you still pay taxes on, and all the utilities taking up square footage in the living area upstairs?"
Roos and O'Day said they would probably sell the house, accept their financial losses and start over somewhere else.
For many others, though, there is no somewhere else. Either because people can't afford to move, or they have such deep ties to their town that they simply can't let go.
Which now leaves our happy rural town life tinged with sadness and worry. There's an excellent YouTube flood fundraising video from Gold Shaw Farm in hard-hit Peacham where the narrator describes how the flood physically and emotionally affected the close-knit town.
What made Peacham especially tragic is that the flood claimed the life of Peacham resident Dylan Kempton, 33, a married father of young children and a man that everybody in town knew and loved.
All these climate change disasters in Vermont make me think of another song, "Our Town," by the wonderful Iris Dement. It's about a woman who lived her entire life in one small town, and now the town has died, and she has to move away. Somewhere.
The vast majority of us in Vermont are not at that point yet. But it makes me wonder if we will see a few of our towns die away.
It would be such a shame to lose places like Peacham, Plainfield, Barre. People in those communities are banding together, and Vermonters are pretty awesome at finding creative solutions to some of our deepest problems.
But some of us might well have to abandon our dreams of living out our days in our small towns, driven out by climate change. I guess Vermont is one microcosm of what's going on everywhere else in the world.
Those lyrics from Dement's "Our Town" haunt me, given what we've been through with climate disasters in recent years:
"And you know the sun's settin' fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' fast down on our town, on our town
Goodnight."
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