LYNDONVILLE— The Gervais family, who own Greg’s Auto Repair on U.S. Route 5, set out in kayaks Thursday morning to assess the damage.
The tops of cars poked out from the brown overflow of the Passumpsic River, including those left by the auto shop’s customers.
“This is the worst I’ve seen,” said Jelena Gervais, who owns the shop with her husband Greg.
It was the third time in 20 years that their business had flooded, but this was by far the worst, she said. Such devastation was “not at all” on her radar Wednesday night, when the remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl unloaded more than 5 inches of rain over parts of central Vermont.
Gervais believed the shop would be okay — open Friday even. What she worried about was a home down the road the family had sold to folks from Barre. The buyers, she sighed, had fled the Granite City after last summer’s flooding.
“That bothers me the most,” Gervais said.
Further down Route 5, Sean Somers, 60, and Jim Gregory, 64, waxed hyperbolic about the water spread before them.
“We’ve never, ever, ever come close to seeing this,” Gregory said.
While Route 5 floods with some regularity, “it never got so high that you couldn’t drive on the top of it,” Somers said.
The two men, aghast, gestured to the tops of vehicles almost entirely submerged.
“Beyond my wildest dreams,” Gregory said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Beyond my wildest dreams’: Lyndonville residents grapple with flood damage .