This is Part 1 of Downstream, a 9-part series looking at what’s changed — and what hasn’t — one year after catastrophic floods swept through Vermont.
How do you commemorate one of the most destructive floods in state history? A year after 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, Vermonters could count the ways.
Brattleboro, for example, screened “Singin’ in the Rain” in a once waterlogged theater.
Pittsfield hosted a potluck picnic on the green where all 546 townspeople had huddled when their lone highway washed away.
And Newfane crowned a pregnant resident who had settled there amid the storm as its “Queen Irene” before joining her for a parade on a newly rebuilt road.
“We think she’s the perfect symbol of new life,” an organizer explained.
A dozen years later, the Green Mountain State is set to mark the first anniversary of what the National Weather Service calls “The Great Vermont Flood of July 2023,” which recorded up to 9 inches of rainfall and ravaged more than $600 million in property from Athens in the south to Walden in the Northeast Kingdom.
But don’t expect balloons or banners.
A crew from Colchester Technical Rescue takes a boat down flooded Main Street in Montpelier on July 11, 2023. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“We are not planning any events,” said Sheila Duranleau, chair of the Washington Selectboard. “We are working tirelessly on reimbursement and rebuilding.”
Ditto in Sutton: “We would like to just move on from it all,” said Patti McClure, the town clerk and treasurer.
And the same in Holland: “Praying this doesn’t happen again,” said Diane Judd, local administrator and president of the Vermont Municipal Clerks and Treasurers Association.
State officials are preparing to remember the floods that began last July 10 with what Gov. Phil Scott calls “a day of reflection.” But locally, most communities are feeling more cautious than celebratory.
“Recovering from this historic, devastating natural disaster is still very much a part of our daily lives,” said Montpelier City Manager Bill Fraser, whose municipal office building is one of many that has reopened yet remains under repair.
Cabot is a rare town set to offer an event. A year after its century-old Willey municipal building flooded, a July 13 gathering there will recognize efforts surrounding not only the cleanup, but also future storm mitigation.
“We’re celebrating community resilience,” said Amanda Otto, an organizer from the Cabot Public Library. “I thought it would be a missed opportunity not to do something.”
A child bikes through floodwater outside the Waterbury Fire Department on July 11, 2023. File photo by David Goodman/VTDigger
A citizen recovery committee that calls itself “Community Resilience for the Waterbury Area” (or CReW) is hoping to hold some sort of observance “to honor everything folks have been and are still going through,” according to member Liz Schlegel.
“This has been a long haul,” Schlegel said, “with flooding in July and then again in December for many.”
Indeed, municipalities faced multiple floods last year, complicating the scheduling of any observance.
“Whereas Irene was like a slap in the face in a single day, communities around Vermont might place this year’s anniversaries very differently,” said Doug Farnham, the state’s chief recovery officer.
Barton, for example, is planning a “History and Resilience Week” in August.
“We’ll lift up all the neat stuff happening in the community,” said Allyson Howell of the sponsoring group Northeast Kingdom Organizing.
But most other localities are too busy trying to rebound to mark anything at any time.
Consider Weston. Its central former church turned playhouse was spared by the state’s biggest natural disaster, the Flood of 1927. Hit hard by Irene, the building was repaired and reopened within months. But last summer’s repeat performance has closed the landmark until at least 2026 so caretakers can gird for the long term.
“As much as I wish we could say, ‘Let’s get back in there as soon as possible,’ the hard truth is we could be looking at floods of a significant scale happening with greater frequency,” said Susanna Gellert, head of the Weston Theater Company that has relocated to its Walker Farm second stage. “We need to do this right.”
‘What a different picture we see now’
“Climate change” wasn’t a household word a century ago when the state commemorated the first anniversary of the Flood of 1927, a still-unmatched calamity that recorded up to 15 inches of rain, 84 deaths and what historians estimate would total about $4 billion in damage today.
“The anniversary of this deluge is not a thing to celebrate but rather to be remembered as the date of a painful visitation for which the people of the state were in no way responsible,” Ludlow’s Vermont Tribune wrote a year later on Nov. 2, 1928. “It was beyond their power to avert it.”
Long before the 1979 creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 1927 flood crews on the cusp of winter could do little more than patch highways until spring. The primitive condition of most Green Mountain roads — fewer than 100 miles were “hard-surfaced,” with the rest being dirt or gravel — spurred Vermont to modernize its infrastructure, leading to the birth of the current state highway system.
Nearly a century ago, residents along Montpelier’s State Street eye the ruins of the state’s biggest natural disaster, the Flood of 1927. Photo by Albertype Co./collection of the Library of Congress
“Sweeping as were the losses and devastation, what a different picture we see now, just one short year since the catastrophe,” the Barre Times reported on Nov. 2, 1928. “We see a Vermont that is largely restored in its material aspects. We see business resumed to its normal point in nearly every instance. We see railroad trains running where there was nothing but yawning gulfs on November 4 last. We see roads restored and even made better.”
That changed upon the arrival of 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, which dumped up to 11 inches of rain, claimed seven lives and destroyed nearly $750 million in property — a figure equal to almost two-thirds of that year’s state general fund budget, according to state statistics.
In the days after the storm, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin crisscrossed the state by National Guard helicopter as workers repaired such crumbled north-south arteries as Route 100 — the state’s longest — and severed east-west corridors including Route 9 linking Bennington and Brattleboro and Route 4 connecting Rutland and White River Junction.
On Irene’s first anniversary a year later, Shumlin traded the whirlybird for wheels.
“The state rebuilt more than 500 miles of damaged road,” he explained, “and we want to use them.”
Shumlin’s travels revealed both progress and lingering problems.
“We have so much to be proud of — and so much more work to do,” he said in 2012. “This is an opportunity not only to commemorate the extraordinary response of Vermonters but also to rededicate ourselves to those who are still struggling.”
‘We still just need to keep pushing’
A year after the July 2023 storm clouds dropped as much as two months of rain in a couple of days — leading to two deaths and an unknown yet highly seen number of displaced individuals and institutions — state officials are voicing similar sentiments.
“We’ve come a long way,” Scott said at a recent press conference. “And we know we have a long way to go.”
FEMA won’t reveal what municipalities it is working with “for privacy reasons,” but can report a total of nearly 200 applicants representing Vermont villages, towns, cities, counties, the state and private nonprofits. Many are covering flood costs with bank lines of credit as they fill out federal reimbursement forms that require intensely specific information, such as how many damaged trees were six or more inches in diameter “at breast height.”
The answer to when they’ll receive money is just as involved.
A helicopter holding Gov. Phil Scott and other administration officials takes off from the Edward F. Knapp State Airport in Berlin for a tour of flood damage on July 12, 2023. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“Because of the different levels of complexity and the need to review for duplication of benefits,” FEMA said in a statement, “the timeline of reimbursement for each category of work will vary by weeks or months, contingent upon how readily FEMA receives information from each applicant to process the documentation.”
But such bureaucracy isn’t the only speed bump. Shaw’s Supermarket in Ludlow, which reopened four months after Irene flooding, is one of many businesses taking a full year to return after the latest rain so as to add better storm barriers to curb future closures.
“Most states take three to five years to recover from a disaster of this size,” said Farnham at the State Recovery Office.
If history is any indication, such timelines can stretch even longer. Although the press declared the 1927 cleanup over upon the first anniversary, it continued for three more years, according to the book “The Troubled Roar of the Waters’: Vermont in Flood and Recovery, 1927-1931.”
“The flood forced us to draw on our reserve energies, to unite in a spirit of brotherhood to help one another, to forget our differences of opinion for the time being and to plan together for the future,” the Burlington Free Press wrote in 1937.
After Irene, many municipalities dripped in red ink for nearly a decade. Bethel, for example, didn’t stop reporting about its more than $8 million in bills until 2017. On the storm’s 10th anniversary in 2021, the state was finishing paperwork on 20 final projects.
“Irene was just the appetizer for the main course that’s yet to come if we don’t buckle down and start making changes,” Neale Lunderville, the state’s first Irene recovery officer, said at the decade mark.
Vermont officials have yet to announce specifics about this summer’s anniversary observance. But they view it simply as a reflective moment of pause in continuing rebuilding and reinforcing efforts.
“Stopping and looking back and updating a year after will be good,” Farnham said. “But we still just need to keep pushing, especially with a short construction season. We need to make all the hay we can this summer.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont flood anniversaries once brought revelry and relief. This summer will be different..