Lake Champlain floods of 2011 renew interest in flood control

Candace Page in the Burlington Free Press: Record-high water one year ago has renewed a question that has vexed two states, a province and two national governments off and on for 100 years: Should spring floods on Lake Champlain and its outlet, the Richelieu River in Quebec, be prevented — or at least reduced — by regulating the flow of water in the Richelieu?

The discussion, still in its earliest stages, includes a lawsuit by Quebec residents seeking to have the Richelieu dredged to handle more water, thus reducing upstream flood levels in the river and Lake Champlain. It also includes a proposal by the federal governments of Canada and the United States to study solutions that could include a flood-control dam.

....Renewed discussion this spring of flood control on the lake comes with a certain irony, as water levels on Lake Champlain and in the Richelieu are near an all-time spring low. Nevertheless, floods are expected to return in future years, and the stakes are high.

Lake Champlain rose to its highest recorded level, 103.2 feet above sea level, on May 6, 2011. High water lasted into mid-June, destroying 24 Vermont homes and damaging another 419. The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid $1.8 million to individuals and $8.6 million to cities, towns and the state to help cover damage to roads, bridges, culverts and other infrastructure.

Flooding along the Richelieu had even more devastating effects, damaging 3,000 houses in 20 communities, forcing more than 1,000 people from their homes and costing governments at least $22.3 million....

A NASA image of flooding along the Richelieu River, Quebec

FEMA, Vermont to pay nearly $20 million for flooded properties, leave land undeveloped

The Republic (Indiana): Gov. Peter Shumlin and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch said on a visit Wednesday to a town hard hit by Tropical Storm Irene that plans to buy nearly $20 million worth of flood-prone property with state and federal money have gotten under way.

Flooding from the Aug. 28 storm took the lives of at least six people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Irene is widely viewed as the worst natural disaster to hit Vermont since at least the flood of 1927.

The official visit Wednesday drew more than 60 people out in chilly temperatures to the Northfield firehouse. Shumlin told of one of the 13 Northfield households flooded during last year's storm when the Dog River overflowed its banks.

"We all knew that it would be unlikely that it would be wise to return to that home, ever, because it had been flooded before and with a climate change future it was clear that it would get flooded again," the governor said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay 75 percent of the $19.8 million in hazard mitigation grants; Shumlin said he was working to ensure the state will pay the remaining 25 percent.

"The state is committed to doing everything we can to make towns and property owners whole under the program," Shumlin said....

FEMA image of a 1998 flood in Vermont

Number of displaced Vermont families may be double

Sally Pollak in the Burlington Free Press (Vermont): Gov. Peter Shumlin said 1,500 to 2,000 Vermont families might have been displaced from their homes by the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Irene. Shumlin said Friday he’s concerned the actual number of families unable to live in their own homes because of the flood is unknown.

“We’re putting together a plan where we’re going to be reaching out once again to community leaders to literally go out and talk and count and find where people are,” Shumlin said. “It’s one of the gaps we have in the system right now.” The governor said he wouldn’t be surprised “in the least” if the number turned out be as many as 2,000 families. Preliminary federal estimates suggested 700 homes were damaged or destroyed by last month’s flooding.

Shumlin said he meets Vermonters every day who are staying with relatives, neighbors and even strangers. These people don’t appear on the government’s lists because “they feel like they have a home,” Shumlin said.

Referring to people in these kinds of temporary living arrangements, who have not classified themselves as displaced or homeless, the governor said: “There are people who may well find, in a couple of months, that their current housing situation is not ideal — for either the host or for them.”...

Vermont's tragic flooding demonstrated the incredible power of water

Matt Sukowski in the Burlington Free Press (Vermont): Maybe the most searing image of the flood tragedy that struck Vermont a week ago was the video of the 140-year-old Lower Bartonsville Covered Bridge in southeastern Vermont washing away. The physical power of the torrent was stunning. The bridge sank, defeated but dignified, into the raging brown water like a captain going down with the ship.

The emotional power was just as striking. In the video, you hear Susan Hammond, the woman shooting the images, crying and swearing as the bridge collapsed. You can’t blame her. Vermont’s worst natural disaster since 1927 felt like a rock-hard sucker punch to the gut. Several days later, Hammond said the whole village of Lower Bartonsville, a section of Rockingham, remained stunned by the loss of the bridge. “It was devastating,” she said.

That Vermont’s usually scenic, tame waterways could rise up and kill people, shove buildings off their foundations, make miles of state highways disappear in a day and upend everyone’s sense of security is testimony to the extreme intensity of the floodwaters.

The volume of water racing down Vermont rivers and brooks boggles the mind. The peak flow along the White River in West Hartford was 100,000 cubic feet per second, said Andy Nash, head meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in South Burlington. That’s 500 times the normal flow of the White River — and equivalent to the normal volume in the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

“The fact it is approaching or maybe exceeding the ’27 flood in certain areas of the state is what startles me more than anything else,” said Barry Cahoon, a river management engineer with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation....

Swept away: the Bartonsville covered bridge in Rockingham, Vermont, shot by Sfoskett, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

A voice from Vermont

Stephen Aldrich, the head of bio-era and a friend of this blog, sent us a heartbreaking e-mail: ...There is a semblance of normalcy inside our house…But outside, the destruction is everywhere, immense, and thoroughly transforming… It’s both difficult and dangerous to move around… Many roads and bridges have been disfigured or destroyed…. Houses have collapsed or been swept away… Fields and forests have simply been erased by the water… vanished….down to the bedrock.

Bethel is the nearest town to our house, just 5 miles away. For us, the leisurely drive into Bethel along our own River Road has for years been an incredibly beautiful and restorative tonic, but now whole sections of the road and the landscape have washed away… as if flushed down a toilet… and what’s left of the landscape is ugly and brutal -- as if a great and destructive battle had taken place here… And it’s everywhere you turn…

It took me more than two hours just to get to Bethel and back on what’s left of a treacherous dirt track…

I’ve been trying to comprehend what has happened here, but words fail me…

On one level, an extraordinarily heavy rainfall upon the steep Vermont hillsides gave birth to an explosion of angry serpents bent on destruction….all feeding the mother of angry river serpents which raged out of all control and destroyed Vermont…. And that is really no exaggeration. Vermont is now just a shadow of what it was… and it is one of the greatest tragedies I have witnessed in life…

My sad thought is that people warming our planet means that more and worse is on the way…

Until I can find new photos, this FEMA photo of a 1998 flood in Vermont will have to do

US flood victims still in the dark, stuck in mud

Scott Malone in Reuters: Residents of several Northeast states approached the Labor Day holiday weekend mired in mud and stuck in the dark on Thursday nearly a week after Hurricane Irene swallowed parts of the region with flooding. About 1.1 million homes and businesses on the East Coast were still without electricity after Irene knocked out power to more than 6.7 million customers on its rampage last Saturday and Sunday.

The upcoming long weekend, normally a celebration of the end of summer, will be a wet, stinky mess for hundreds of thousands of homeowners who suffered damage, their cities and towns submerged under floodwaters in states such as New York, New Jersey and Vermont. Hundreds of people were rescued in Paterson, New Jersey, one of several New York City suburbs that were under water while the city itself went relatively unscathed some 20 miles away.

In Vermont, the National Guard airlifted food and water to towns cut off by storm-damaged highways. Upstate New York saw rural mountain resorts flooded, ruining business for the holiday weekend. "Everything smells like sewer because the water got up so high. It stinks so bad," Melody Hawkins, 55, said as she sat on the stoop of her home in Ludlow, one of more than a dozen towns in Vermont -- an inland state normally protected from tropical storms -- to face severe flooding....

At 11:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 28, Irene finally became a post-tropical cyclone near the U.S.-Canadian border, the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported. NASA image

Flooding persists as US east coast reels from Irene

John Curran in the Associated Press: As emergency airlift operations brought ready-to-eat meals and water to Vermont residents left isolated and desperate, states along the Eastern Seaboard continued to be battered by the after effects of Irene, the destructive hurricane turned tropical storm. Dangerously damaged infrastructure, 2.5 million people without power and thousands of water-logged homes and businesses continued to overshadow the lives of residents and officials from North Carolina through New England, where the storm has been blamed for at least 44 deaths in 13 states.

Raging floodwaters continued to ravage parts of northern New Jersey on Wednesday morning, even after the state's rain-swollen rivers crested and slowly receded. The Passaic River crested Tuesday night, causing extensive flooding and forcing a round of evacuations and rescues in Paterson, the state's third-largest city.

"Been in Paterson all my life, I'm 62 years old, and I've never seen anything like this," said resident Gloria Moses as she gathered with others at the edge of what used to be a network of streets, now covered by a lake. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, after touring Wayne, through which the Passaic also flows, said Tuesday night he saw "just extraordinary despair."

In Connecticut, the Connecticut River at Hartford crested Tuesday evening at 24.8 feet, the highest level since 1987, according to Nicole Belk, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service, in Taunton, Mass. But she said levees helped minimize flooding in riverside communities.

She said the river could still rise slightly farther south, in Middletown, where some streets and neighborhoods were already experiencing minor flooding. Denise Ruzicka, director of inland water resources for Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said flood control dams and basins that New England states installed after 1955 floods helped prevent a catastrophe in the lower Connecticut River basin....

Sunset after Irene passed in Union City, New Jersey, shot by Luigi Novi (or Nightscream), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Irene 'just devastating' in Vermont, governor says

CNN: Floodwaters brought by Tropical Storm Irene began to recede Monday in parts of Vermont, but the governor warned that further flooding and loss of life are likely ahead for the small, rural state. "It's just devastating," Gov. Peter Shumlin said Monday. "Whole communities under water, businesses, homes, obviously roads and bridges, rail transportation infrastructure. We've lost farmers' crops," he said. "We're tough folks up here but Irene ... really hit us hard."

Hundreds of people remained trapped Monday in communities cut off by raging floodwaters that washed out or otherwise damaged 263 roads and bridges, Shumlin said. Exactly how many were stranded remained unclear, he said. "It's hard for us to know, frankly, because it's hard for us to get into the communities we need to get to," he said.

Highlighting the transportation problems, the Vermont National Guard had to travel through neighboring Massachusetts to get rescue crews to the small, cut-off town of Wilmington, the governor said.

Three deaths had been confirmed as a result of the storm. A woman who was standing near the Deerfield River in Wilmington died after she was swept away by floodwaters. Her body was recovered, according to authorities...

Vermont farmers debilitated by floods hope for federal relief

Eric Blokland in VTdigger.org: …With wetter-than-average spring flooding in many parts of Vermont before the most recent storm, farmers around the state are debilitated by mud, lost crops and inaccessible or damaged fields. Bob Paquin, state director of the Farm Service Agency, says that federal aid is already coming in, and he expects the U.S. Department of Agriculture to declare some or all of Vermont an agricultural disaster area shortly. “It’s probably the latest year in terms of being able to get on the fields that we’ve seen in a long, long time,” said Paquin. “This is more widespread: that’s one of the things that’s quite different this year.”

Big snows in March coupled with record rains in April and May took a cumulative toll and continued flooding mires damage assessments. Paquin said it’s not possible to “see the damage if it’s under water.”

The Farm Service Agency will provide on-the-ground reports to the USDA, and while federal assistance will provide aid throughout the summer, it will be fall before the overall cost of the flooding on Vermont’s farms is determined; the agency must have data from the harvest to allocate assistance.
A Sluggish Spring

Near the top of Beckley Hill in Barre Town, long-time grower Alan LePage hasn’t visited some of his low-lying fields in over a week. “I can’t look at it,” he said on a recent afternoon when temperatures in the high 80s had little effect on water pooling between his raised beds….

A devastated trailer park after a 1998 flood in Vermont, FEMA photo