Deluge: Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont’s Flash Floods, and How One Small State Saved Itself

5 | Unheralded Devastation

unheralded devastation You understand being flooded. You don’t understand being washed away. c  Jennifer Dorta-Duque, Jamaica town lister, Jamaica Memorial Library board chair, Jamaica Old Home Day committee member, emergency shelter co-coordinator, innkeeper as irene pummeled vermont, towns from Bennington and Brattleboro in the south to Waterbury in the north saw their worst flooding since 1927—or in southeastern Vermont, since 1938. Throughout the state, official reports showed that Irene had unleashed more than seven inches of rain, particularly in Ludlow, Cavendish, Woodstock, and Randolph—though unofficial reports often showed much higher totals (in Pittsfield, Peter Borden’s two sons measured sixteen inches of rain in a jar they had left on their porch). Irene’s wake of destruction left Vermonters shocked. Normally placid streams tore out their banks, and whole embankments collapsed, carrying the load of dirt, rocks, boulders , trees, and anything else that sat in the way downstream. In geologic terms, Irene created mass wasting. And most of the flood damage was caused not by the state’s larger rivers, but by smaller mountain tributaries . Even rivulets. In Newfane, just north of Brattleboro along Route 30, the Rock River demolished parts of the Dover Road, and the Smith Brook took out sections of South Wardsboro Road. Two houses were destroyed, including the second home of a Scottish family still overseas. The Mill Brook in Danby threatened to inundate that small southern Vermont village along U.S. Route 7 after a house once owned by Nobel Prize–winning author 5 Shinn - Deluge.indb 55 6/5/2013 1:04:17 PM 56 the storm Pearl Buck collapsed into the brook. As the house jammed against the village bridge, Tommy Fuller, who was working his excavator to try to fortify the town bridge, smashed the house with the excavator’s shovel. Had he not acted quickly, the brook would have overflowed the bridge and flooded the entire village. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, the town had celebrated its 250th anniversary. In tiny Plymouth, on Route 100 between Ludlow and Killington in central Vermont, a rivulet tumbling down a steep mountainside left four to five feet of rock piled on the road and nearly took out a nearby sugarhouse. Ten miles south of Montpelier in Northfield, thirteen homes on the east side of Water Street were destroyed beyond repair by the Dog River. In Cavendish, near Ludlow in central Vermont, the Black River cut a new path when the town’s hydroelectric dam overflowed. The “new” river carved a hole eighty feet deep in Route 131 just east of this lovely village of stately stone buildings. The hydrodam, built in 1907–8 by the Claremont (NH) Power Company, harnesses power generated from the water losing 120 feet of elevation through the narrow, boulder-strewn Cavendish Gorge. But the river didn’t always flow through the gorge. Sometime in the geologic past it had flowed through the valley where Route 131 now sits. When Irene’s floodwaters topped the hydrodam, the water found its former route—and in the process tore out the road, leaving what locals referred to as the “Cavendish Canyon.” The torrent also took out the town’s water and sewer line (the wastewater treatment facility sits adjacent to Route 131, just below the “canyon”). The river had found the same path during the 1927 flood and had overtaken several of the village’s lovely stone homes. Farther north, in Bethel, Lang Durfee thought he could hold back the Third Branch of the White River from his family’s lumber business with two rows of concrete jersey barriers and hundreds of forty-pound sandbags . Throughout the day, Bethel Mills employees fortified the 230-yearold business (believed to be the oldest continuously run company in the state) with barriers, drained the torrential rain pouring off the acre of metal roofs, and moved inventory to higher ground. But by 6:00 p.m., the crews exhausted, Durfee sent them home, then watched helplessly as the sky grew darker and the water deeper, topping the jersey barriers. With the Third Branch draining mountains farther north, where Irene continued to unload rain into the night, the flood in Bethel would not Shinn - Deluge.indb 56 6/5/2013 1:04:17 PM Unheralded Devastation 57 crest until close to midnight. Late that evening, from his second-story office, Durfee reached outside the window and touched the water...