This is Part 10 of Downstream, a 10-part series looking at what’s changed — and what hasn’t — one year after catastrophic floods swept through Vermont.
BARRE — On Monday, July 10, 2023, Nancy and Leonard Morin packed their medicines and a suitcase and fled from their home. Eyeing reports of a large storm, they feared their house on River Street would flood. Hours later, the surging Stevens Branch, feet away from their back door, crept inside.
The next day, a friend brought a tractor to help the Morins dig their way through mud back into the house. They employed a sump pump, tore up carpet and did “what we could do,” Nancy Morin said. It didn’t take long for them to realize that they would never move home.
“We did not rebuild, and we’re not going to,” she said. “We’ve asked for a buyout.”
Last year’s flooding is an example of the extreme weather that scientists have long predicted climate change would cause, and dangerous flooding is likely to hit Vermont more often in the future.
In fact, meteorologists with the National Weather Service have warned that Vermont could see flash flooding starting on Wednesday — exactly one year after last year’s flooding. This time, the forecast is a result of Tropical Storm Beryl’s path, which is expected to collide with warm, humid weather in the Green Mountain State. As of Tuesday, the flooding was not forecasted to be as severe as last year’s event, though the state could see up to 4 to 6 inches before Friday morning, according to the weather service, with 6 to 8 inches possible in some isolated areas.
As state and local leaders begin preparing for a future with more flooding, the state has an unprecedented opportunity to prevent the scale of disaster that unfolded last July. Vermont is set to receive as much as $90 million to construct flood reduction projects — almost three times the amount it received after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
History shows that preventing damage is possible. After Irene, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and killed seven people in the state, some towns undertook projects that successfully diverted or reduced floodwaters.
For example, officials in Brandon built a giant box culvert where a small canal had previously restricted the river. The project saved the town from severe flooding last summer, officials said at the time.
Nancy Morin at her house on River Street in Barre on Thursday, June 20. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
While the federal money sets Vermont up to begin a flood resilience undertaking of new proportions, the increased risk of extreme weather means the money may not go as far as it otherwise would have.
“Yes, there’s 90 million,” said Pete Fellows, a floodplain manager at the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, which is working with the state to coordinate flood reduction projects. “If we can use that effectively, I think we will be in good shape. Will we be ahead of the curve? I don’t think so. There’s just that much need out there.”
A lot of money
After the flood last July, Stephanie Smith, state hazard mitigation officer with Vermont Emergency Management, submitted a request for funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s hazard mitigation grant program. It was based on “the communities that we saw really, really heavily hit in July, recognizing that they might be in a good place to start talking about what they can do to reduce future risk going forward,” Smith said.
So far, those municipalities include Montpelier, Barre City, Barton, Berlin, Bridgewater, Glover, Hardwick, Jamaica, Johnson, Londonderry, Ludlow, Orleans, Plymouth, Weston, Wolcott and Woodstock. Towns can submit pre-application forms for funding to the state until August 16.
After Irene, Vermont received $34 million in funding from FEMA to reduce future flood risks. This time, the state is expecting $80 million to $90 million, according to Smith. The increase in funding is “based on the scale of the impact from July,” she said, but projects don’t need to be directly related to the July floods.
That money is set to become part of a new state program, called the Resilience Initiative for Vermont Empowerment and Recovery, or RIVER.
The program, coordinated by Vermont Emergency Management, is similar to the Vermont Economic Resiliency Initiative, launched after Irene, which coordinated and funded five projects across the state. This time, the scale is much bigger.
In June, the state announced plans to cover the 25% match that FEMA requires of the local communities, so while local governments will need to manage the grant, it will otherwise come at no cost.
Smith said her team is reaching out to municipalities “that might not have reached out to us because they knew that the match was going to be a problem.”
The projects could include bigger culverts, improved bridges, buyouts, floodproofing buildings and restoring floodplain, among others.
It’s a big opportunity, but distributing the money is challenging. Only projects that can prove they’ll reduce flooding enough to justify the cost will be eligible for funding through RIVER, Smith said. While FEMA puts the state in charge of managing the money, the federal agency creates the rules for its use.
“If the formula works, then you can qualify. If it doesn’t, you can’t,” said Fellows, with the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission. “And if you don’t have good estimates on past and future damages, you’re also up a creek.”
Also, FEMA’s formula doesn’t account for the changes in precipitation and extreme weather events caused by climate change, which makes it hard to know how much flooding a project could reduce. A project that is expected to reduce flooding by six inches today might be less effective in the future, Smith said, because climate change is expected to alter the equation by adding more water to the mix.
RIVER isn’t the only program funding flood reduction work. Smith is expecting that a state-funded program called the Flood Resilient Communities Fund will have roughly $20 million to fill gaps for projects outside of the RIVER program.
While RIVER offers “a lot of money to do proactive things that help reduce our future risk,” she said, she’s still working to set expectations about the complicated nature of flood resilience work.
There’s no “silver bullet, one thing that will just completely remove flood risk,” she said. “And a lot of what we’re talking about is incremental progress at lowering flood elevations.”
Fellows has also tempered his expectations.
He referenced the flooding in Montpelier, with the vast amount of water in the downtown buildings. When you combine Vermont’s vulnerability — with many communities situated in river valleys — and the increasing likelihood of floods, it adds up to a lot of risk to try to address, he said.
Some of that flood reduction work should have happened sooner, he said.
A roadmap
As the rain fell last July and some residents, like the Morins, began evacuating, Barre City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro was circling the city with staff from the public works and public safety departments.
In key locations along Stevens Branch, a tributary of the Winooski River, and Gunner’s Brook, which feeds into Stevens Branch, high water would signal broader problems in the city. In one spot, Storellicastro kept his eye on an ice tea bottle someone had left near the river bank — if the river took it, they were in trouble, he remembers thinking.
By around 3:30 p.m., the bottle was gone.
The Stevens Branch of the Winooski River flows behind Nancy Morin’s house on River Street in Barre on Thursday, June 20. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“Water was coming off West Second Street,” Storellicastro said. “What happens next is it comes to North Main Street. What happens after that is that the public safety building gets isolated.”
Officials made a swift decision to move operations out of the public safety building and set up services in the Barre Auditorium, which is perched on a hill. After that, things happened fast. Water pooled and the river rose until 5 p.m., when “it became what it was,” Storellicastro said: The river jumped its banks and rushed into the city. The fire department and public works staff performed at least two dozen rescues that night.
Nearly a year later, sitting in his office chair, Storellicastro could recount each hour’s events by memory.
It seemed that he had memorized the river, and that he knew all of its threats, and the places where it could spill and bleed into the city. The scars of July 10 had created a blueprint for change.
Creating a plan to reduce flooding is a process that requires funding, engineering, local knowledge and a lot of coordination. While Barre City has full-time staff, other places have barely had the resources to manage the flood’s immediate aftermath.
In Wolcott, the floods were “pretty devastating,” said Linda Martin, chair of the town’s selectboard. “We had over $2 million in damage. We’re still struggling with getting a lot of it back up and running.”
The town hall, fire department and highway department flooded, and members of the fire department had to perform complex rescues, she said. The flood isolated the town, preventing help from getting in and residents from getting out.
Martin said she’s paid about $1,000 per year for her work on the selectboard. In the last year, that work has doubled. Recently, she was working about 30 hours per week, which included coordinating seven buyouts and moving other flood recovery measures forward.
“I don’t know how much longer I can continue doing this for free,” she said.
Despite the challenges, Martin said the town has flooded before, and she has been working on resilience efforts for a while. Town residents have agreed to design a community wastewater system, for example, and permanently protect a town forest to help absorb floodwaters. They’re trying to remove old bridge abutments that have pushed water in the wrong direction.
The town employs a program manager, who has been working with the town’s insurance company and FEMA, which pays for administrative work done on their projects, she said.
“I have a few people that I rely on. We have an engineer we rely on,” she said. “You just have to reach out for help, for people that have the experience. I’m not experienced in rebuilding half-million dollar culverts.”
In Barre, the city’s flood reduction plan is sprawling, and it will continue to evolve as city leaders become aware of people who are interested in buyouts, Storellicastro said. It includes removing an old railroad trestle that traps debris and gets in the river’s way, upsizing new culverts and other infrastructure to move the water quickly, and installing new windows and doors on city buildings that have been flooded. Buyouts, too, are a big part of the plan, he said.
“We need to restore floodplain,” he said. “We need places for the water to go.”
To get that floodplain back, the city is pursuing more than 55 buyouts in several neighborhoods using RIVER funding. They’re also applying for an environmental justice grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to cover some buyouts in the North End, where the Morins lived, and the state has asked for a $50 million allocation of federal funding from Vermont’s congressional delegation for other improvements in Barre’s North End.
The town plans to sell some of its land, such as a parking lot on Seminary Street that isn’t heavily used, to housing developers. Storellicastro hopes developers will replace lost housing units with dense, multi-family housing buildings that are located in safer areas and built to withstand flooding by, for example, building parking space on the bottom floor.
Barre’s working plan has a number of similarities to a plan that Gov. Phil Scott, who grew up in Barre, proposed late last year.
The theme of the governor’s plan, Storellicastro said, is to restore floodplains and build high, dense urban housing.
“That’s what this is,” he said, pointing to a sheet of paper with a map that reads, “reimagine the North End.” “This is restoring floodplain and dense urban housing.”
A changing landscape
Kevin Geiger, the lead coordinator of the RIVER program at Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, sees Vermont through “flood goggles.”
“You know that movie where the kid says, ‘I see dead people?’” he said. “I see floods.”
When he drives, Geiger sees rivers squished next to roads. Those rivers have been forced to move in unnatural ways, which increases the risk that, with enough water and force, they’ll encroach on the built world. When he hears big rocks move in the river near his own home, he knows he should start to worry.
There’s been an adjustment in Vermonters’ attitudes between Irene and now, Geiger said. More people are recognizing that floods in Vermont are not one-off events. Still, he’s not sure if attitudes are changing fast enough.
“If you think this was a one-off, then you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a glitch. The systems we have are good. We don’t really need to structurally change things,’” he said.
What Vermont is facing, he said, is a “very different ballgame.”
Nancy Morin at her house on River Street in Barre on Thursday, June 20. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
In Barre, the July 2023 flooding has already changed the city. The Morins are among dozens of households to request a buyout, according to Storellicastro. While some people bounced back, others are “still in the throes of it,” he said.
“You still drive along North Main Street; there’s some dark houses there. It’s tough, still, for a lot of people.”
On River Street, “a big cluster of people” have moved away, he said. “They’re done. Many of them lived through two or three floods.”
While FEMA and the state are covering buyouts, the city is still facing a loss: people.
“All those FEMA buyouts end up becoming permanent green space,” he said, and the city loses some of its tax base.
For Nancy and Leonard Morin, the decision to move out of their flooded home on River Street was simple, but deciding where to go was much more complicated. They’re currently living out of Nancy’s brother’s trailer in South Royalton.
The amount of money they would receive from a buyout would depend on the appraised value of their home, which is currently valued at $70,000, according to Storellicastro. Nancy said that appraisal is outdated: It took place before another flood in May of 2011. Afterward, the Morins renovated, adding a big deck and an addition, she said.
They are planning to get a new appraisal and negotiate with FEMA, she said. On top of that, the Morins already received $50,000 through their flood insurance, she said, which further reduces the amount they could be reimbursed by the federal agency.
As a result, Nancy doesn’t expect money from the buyout to go far in Vermont’s current housing market. She said they’ve looked around, and can’t find anything to buy under $300,000 that wouldn’t need renovations.
“Have you looked at the prices of rent?” she asked a reporter. “It’s prohibitive.”
The couple has lived in Barre since the 1980s, and they raised their kids in the city. Now, they plan to move to Florida.
“It’s been hard because doctors, dentists, grandchildren, children, they’re all right around Barre,” she said. “To have to uproot and go to Florida is going to be devastating.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: With $90M, Vermont has a big opportunity to reduce flood risks, but there’s no ‘silver bullet’.