A series of catastrophic floods over the past 14 months is raising new questions about how, and whether, Vermonters can coexist with the rivers they live by.
Until the early morning hours of Tuesday, July 30, Andy Poginy’s backyard in Lyndonville was an idyllic rural sanctuary.
“Where we are standing right at the moment — this used to be a nice, beautiful lawn with an artesian well about 60 to 100 feet away,” Poginy said earlier this month. “To my right was where my business shop used to be, which is no longer. The brook has completely changed its course.”
For a lot residents on Red Village Road in Lyndonville, the clear and quiet Hawkins Brook had been one of the reasons they loved living there. Now, it may be the reason they have to leave.
Catastrophic flooding late last month turned the brook into a wrecking ball that damaged or destroyed more than a dozen homes and at least two businesses, including Poginy’s wood manufacturing operation.
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Those floods also altered the brook’s course in ways that now endanger many more. The Hawkins Brook has carved an entirely new river channel that has left homes such as Poginy’s even more susceptible to the next flash flood.
The brook used to be about 150 feet away from his home.
“As you can see here … it’s within, what, 20 feet of the deck? So I now have waterfront property, so I guess in my retirement I can just sit here with my fish pole and just fish off the deck I suppose,” he said.
Poginy’s handling the setback with humor. But what he really wants is for the state to reroute the river back to its original course, to give him and his wife a fighting chance to live out their years in the home they’ve shared for four decades.
That plan got shot down, however, by a river management engineer from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation who visited Poginy’s house a few days after the flood.
“He walked the property and he came back and said, ‘I don’t have news that you’re going to want to hear.’ And I asked him what the bad news was going to be. And he said, ‘The brook will now stay where it is.’ And I probably said some choice words,” Poginy recalled.
Rob Evans, who heads up the Watershed Management Division at the Department of Environmental Conservation, said more frequent and more severe weather events have ramped up the conflict between man-made infrastructure and dynamic river corridors. And he said sometimes, nature wins, even when homeowners want to try to beat it back.
“Yes, sometimes what they want to do would create a more dangerous or more unstable condition,” Evans said. “And we say, ‘You can’t do that.’”
Humans have been in conflict with nature since the dawn of civilization. But here in Vermont, that tension has begun to threaten the future of historic settlement patterns.
Who is going to have the appetite to look at a downtown like Plainfield or Barnet and say, "This is a thing of the past"?Jason Batchelder, Commissioner of Environmental Conservation
Jason Batchelder, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, said protecting residential and commercial infrastructure from what appears to be a terrifying new normal isn’t always possible.
“So there has to be a balance there between our ecological mission and our ability to be frank with people if we feel they’re going to be in harm’s way for the rest of their existence, right?” Batchelder told Vermont Public.
Batchelder said he’s haunted by the stories of Vermonters such as Poginy.
“And I can’t imagine being that person standing 10 feet away from a river that used to be 150 feet away. I can’t imagine it,” he said.
But he said the series of floods Vermont has experienced over the past 14 months have prompted some serious introspection on his part.
Batchelder says the question he asks himself is, "Who is going to have the appetite to look at a downtown like Plainfield or Barnet and say, ‘This is a thing of the past’?”
Plainfield and Barnet experienced some of the most catastrophic damage from the flooding on July 10. Other towns built along river corridors — many in the Northeast Kingdom — have also seen severe and repeated damage over the past year.
Batchelder said the process of relocating small neighborhoods, let alone entire villages, is tough to comprehend. But he said regularly repeating the psychological trauma and financial loss of large-scale flooding also seems untenable.
“And at what point will we as a collective society say, ‘It’s time’?” he said.
Knowing when to pull up stakes, however, can be a complex decision that often involves a messy financial calculus for residents who are at risk. Like in Richmond, where the usually placid Snipe Ireland Brook jumped its banks on July 10 and inundated several homes on Red Barn Lane and Lily Pond Circle.
Residents there want the state to engineer the brook to reduce the chance the next event does even more damage. And Lily Pond Circle resident Shay DiCocco said the state has indicated that sort of work is possible here. But he said they’ve been told they’re on their own if they want to make it happen.
“The only solution thus far is for homeowners to take it upon themselves to clear out those rivers, or hire a contractor on their own dime to clear out those rivers, to build up banks, remove silt, do whatever it is to look like it did before when they had some protection,” he said.
DiCocco said that work could cost upwards of $45,000.
“It just seems pretty shocking that the state doesn’t have some sort of resource that they can bring in in these kinds of situations to alleviate the burden on folks that have just suffered a massive flood,” he said.
More often than not, folks that have an improvement within the river corridor that’s being threatened get the authorization to protect that improvement. But more often than not, they don’t have the money to do that.Rob Evans, Department of Environmental Conservation
Rob Evans, with the Department of Environmental Conservation, said communities across Vermont who want to do flood mitigation are contending with the same lack of access to public resources.
“More often than not, folks that have an improvement within the river corridor that’s being threatened get the authorization to protect that improvement,” Evans said. “But more often than not, they don’t have the money to do that, and that’s the hard part.”
Elected officials in Vermont and Washington, D.C., are in the midst of long-running debate over how to manage the enormous costs of disaster mitigation. The future of residents in Richmond, Lyndonville and other communities may hinge on the outcome.
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