“Because we’re not on a coastline or behind a levee, we’re not a priority update area.” “FEMA’s stalled in Vermont,” said Swanberg. In some areas of the state, such as the northeast corner known as the Northeast Kingdom, many of the FEMA maps are 30 years old and exist only on paper. It created damage along corridors never identified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as Special Flood Hazard Areas. When the water breached river channels during Irene, it behaved like water from a firehose, not just flooding homes but sweeping them away. “It’s clear to us that flooding is not just the water rising,” said Swanberg, “It’s the power of water that is causing the damage to roads and bridges and culverts.” By making them straighter and easier to build around, it meant that heavy rains turned them from placid waterways into chutes of destruction. One of the main takeaways from Irene was that development had changed the landscape around rivers. It’s in the statute now that state plans and municipal plans need to address flood resilience and river corridor protection.” Restoring Rivers There’s been this alignment of incentives for municipalities to be responsible for this larger purpose. Most importantly, said Ned Swanberg, the state’s flood hazard mapping coordinator: “The science has been integrated into policy. The state’s largest utility, Green Mountain Power, said it is working toward decentralizing its grid to make power outages easier to contain and easier to recover from. Roads and bridges have been rebuilt to withstand future floods. Some municipalities have bought out homeowners in the worst devastation zones, in order to prevent future damage. The state passed legislation increasing government’s role in flood response, and launched a series of websites, including Flood Ready Vermont and Vermont Climate Assessment, to make residents aware of its programs. “The sound of heavy rain is still a little nervous-making,” said Liz Kenton, a Brattleboro, resident who survived the storm.Īfter Irene swept through, Vermont set about understanding the devastation and working toward resilience. More than 2,400 roads, 800 homes and businesses, 300 bridges (including historic covered bridges) and a half dozen railroad lines were destroyed or damaged, according to the National Oceanic Administration Agency (NOAA). Vermont’s vulnerability to flooding was the harsh reality Irene drove home in 2011. And residents of the Green Mountain State, crisscrossed by rivers and streams, have a lot to worry about in the future.Įven inland states like Vermont are never out of reach of Atlantic storms, and hurricanes and Nor’easters of the future will be even wetter because warmer air in the atmosphere holds more water, climate scientists say. It turns out, Vermont wasn’t that unlikely a candidate for all that damage. In all, it checked in at $14.3 billion, the sixth-costliest hurricane in American history. Irene dumped as much as 11 inches of rain on parts of Vermont, and caused $733 million in damage. But while winds and storm surge make hurricanes so telegenic, what made this one so destructive was rain. Its winds dwindled once it made landfall. Irene was actually only a hurricane for a brief stretch over distant North Carolina. Its memory is eclipsed for many by Sandy, which followed a year later. With no ocean coastline, Vermont might have seemed an unlikely candidate to be devastated by a hurricane five years ago, and to most, Irene was an entirely forgettable storm. Vermont is a shim of a state, the size and shape of a scanty slice of pie, or a narrow wedge of its finest cheddar.
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