Hundreds of Moretown residents stranded in their homes

A flooded driveway in Moretown on July 11, 2024. Photo by Peter D’Auria

Wednesday night, as the Mad River rose, Moretown turned into “an island,” Moretown Selectboard Chair Tom Martin told VTDigger.

At roughly 1 a.m. on Thursday morning, town officials sounded a siren and sent out an alert urging residents to evacuate. In the early morning, emergency workers conducted two swift-water rescues.

By around 10 a.m., the water had largely receded, and Martin and other town officials were out assessing the damage. Route 100b, which cuts through the town, was smeared with mud, and dirt driveways on either side were swamped with churned-up muck.

Emergency workers were strolling through town, and shovel-wielding residents in boots were out cleaning up.

“It’s been a long night,” Martin said.

Moretown Selectboard chair Tom Martin, left, and Emergency Coordinator Stefan Pratt assess the damage in Moretown on the morning of Thursday, July 11, 2024. Photo by Peter D’Auria/VTDigger

South of Moretown, a bridge on 100b over the Mad River was damaged and impassable, and officials were diverting traffic onto the unpaved Pony Farm road.

Water had torn up unpaved roads throughout town, stranding an estimated hundreds of residents in their homes. “There’s no danger, but they can’t go anywhere,” Martin said.

Stefan Pratt, the town’s emergency coordinator, estimated that most of the homes in town and many roads had been at least slightly damaged by the flooding.

“It’s got to be millions of dollars in infrastructure damage,” Pratt said.

Pratt said he has been the Moretown emergency coordinator for roughly five years. Before last summer, he said, things in town had been fairly quiet. But in the past 12 months, the town has seen three flood events.

“There hasn’t really been anything bad before July last year,” Pratt said. “And then we had December last year. And now we have July again.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hundreds of Moretown residents stranded in their homes.