CLIMATEWIRE | BARRE, Vermont — Melissa Pecor stacked sandbags by the doors of her restaurant Wednesday — exactly one year after the town was submerged by a historic flood.
Pecor hadn’t finished repairs from last year’s flood when another downpour came Wednesday night, the anniversary of a nearly 8-inch deluge that devastated this working class community best known for its granite quarry.
"I cried every day," she said.
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Now the town is feeling a dark sense of déjà vu. Nearly 5 inches of rain fell over several hours on Wednesday, leaving parts of Barre covered in a thick layer of mud. On Thursday morning, clouds of dust filled the air as trucks loaded with excavators passed up and down North Main Street.
The flooding makes Vermont the latest victim of Hurricane Beryl, an early season storm that cut a swath of destruction across the Caribbean and knocked out power to about 2 million people in Texas on Monday before weakening and heading inland. In Vermont, roads were washed out and more than 100 people had to be rescued Wednesday night as bursts of water fell on the central part of the state. One fatality was reported.
Scientists say it's the kind of increasingly frequent severe weather caused by a warming planet. And it showcases the growing strain facing small states as they struggle to come up with money to clean up from past storms and prepare for future ones.
A report submitted to the Vermont Legislature estimated that last year’s flooding caused $300 million in economic damage in the central part of the state. State legislators have grappled with the aftermath ever since, passing laws aimed at restricting development in floodplains, creating a grant program to help communities pay for flood damage and approving a so-called climate superfund to require oil companies to pay for climate damages.
The 2023 storm hit Barre like a gut punch, damaging about 10 percent of the city’s housing stock and leading to $4 million in household and individual assistance payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Signs of last year's disaster are still visible, even as residents like Pecor begin cleaning up from the latest flood.
The floor of her restaurant, the Quarry, still bows and quivers like the deck of a ship. Her insurance company paid for a fraction of the repairs, then dropped her policy, she said. A new insurer raised her rates.
During the latest flood, no water came into the restaurant. Diners had already begun trickling into the restaurant around noon Thursday, a sharp contrast to last year when the restaurant was closed for more than two weeks.
“I don’t know how we’d do it again,” Pecor said as a group of strangers scraped mud from the sidewalk outside.
Tanya MacAuley, a special education teacher who tends bar at the Quarry over the summer, called this week's flood "depressing."
“It felt like we were just getting back on our feet,” she said.
Many of the students she works with are from poor families and were left homeless by last year’s floods. “We spent the first part of the year just dealing with the trauma,” MacAuley said.
Barre, a small city of about 8,500 people, exists in the shadow of the state capital, Montpelier, which was also badly damaged in the 2023 storm. Its stone quarries drew waves of Italian stonemasons to central Vermont in the late 1800s. But it has fallen on hard times. About a quarter of its population lives below the poverty line. The median household income of $54,000 is about $20,000 less than the state average.
“These kinds of things just hit a little harder here,” said Angie Harbin, executive director of Downstreet Housing and Community Development, a local nonprofit, between glances at her phone on Thursday morning.
Mud covered the parking lot outside the organization’s office. Water had gashed the ground near the entrance of the building. Nearby, water spewed into the street as it was pumped from the basement of the Barre Community Justice Center.
Last year, Downstreet had to relocate more than two dozen families in the wake of the storm. Repairs to some of its housing units were just completed in March. So far, the flooding this week seemed more manageable, Harbin said.
“This is much more minor,” she said.
That assessment was shared by several Barre residents. Much of the damage from last year’s flooding came as local rivers leapt from their banks after 48 hours of rain. The damage this week was caused by flash flooding. Rain began falling hard around 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, overwhelming the drainage system. Water bubbled from grates and filled the streets. By 9:30 p.m. the rain began to subside.
Sue Higby was using a hose to wash mud off the sidewalk at Studio Place Arts, the nonprofit she has led for more than two decades. The $180,000 in repairs made to the old downtown building last year, including masonry work to patch the foundation and elevating the heating system, staved off damage this week.
She called the cleanup from the 2023 storm harrowing, saying it felt like she “was gambling out in Las Vegas” as she threw money at overbooked contractors in hopes of securing their services. Federal money for the cleanup has been slow in coming, making it hard for residents and the city to steel themselves against future storms.
Higby said she had mostly finished cleaning up from last year’s storm a few weeks ago.
“Here I am again, but this is so much better,” she said.
But not everyone escaped the storm's wrath. Thirty people took shelter overnight at the Barre Auditorium, a gymnasium that often hosts the state high school basketball championships. That was less than the 100 people that sheltered there last year.
In Barre’s North End, deep mud covered streets, a gas station parking lot and the floor of a Dollar General store. Tina Pecor was smoking a cigarette on her porch after having 6 to 8 feet of water pumped from her basement.
“I was worried to go to sleep. I was like, am I going to wake up floating down the road,” she said.
She counts herself lucky. Floodwaters last year reached the second floor of the apartment where she lives. This year, it did not make it inside the house. Her landlord had redone the floors and installed new appliances prior to her moving in recently.
Barre has gotten better at preparing for storms, said City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro. But many of the grants the city is trying to get for infrastructure upgrades in the wake of last year’s storm are still tied up in bureaucratic red tape.
“We couldn’t even make it through the application process before it happened again,” Storellicastro said. “There’s been a lot of underinvestment in the city and it's catching up to us."
That's a big challenge in a community that largely sits inside a federally designated floodplain. Barre approved about 20 property buyouts, from around 60 applications, in an attempt to remove homes from its low-lying areas. The city is waiting for final approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency before razing them.
The city also wants to raise a bridge, increase the size of its culverts and install a gauge on the river which runs through the city. The city currently measures river depth with marks spray painted onto a rock outside the public works building, Storellicastro said.
“We have a lot of aging infrastructure,” he said. “The volume that came down, the burst that it came down in, it just couldn’t keep up.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.