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
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