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

10 | Onward

onward We are more connected to each other than ever. While we were working at a breakneck pace to re-establish households and share gasoline, electricity, propane, food, medical needs, clean-up duty, outside communications, accounting for every citizen, fema paperwork, and the list goes on, we didn’t have time to judge each other negatively, and as a result we were all mightily impressed with our neighbors. c  Angelique Lee, “Postcard from Pittsfield: The new normal,” in VTDigger.com when outside help reached montpelier after the 1927 flood, Vermont governor John E. Weeks reportedly said, “Vermont can take care of its own” (though according to D. P. and N. R. Clifford, in their book “The Troubled Roar of the Waters”: Vermont in Flood and Recovery, that phrase did not become part of flood lore until well after 1927). Although outside help did assist the state in its recovery after the 1927 flood, Weeks’s supposed declaration is a sentiment that prevailed in that recovery as much as it did after Irene. On September 1, 2011, President Barack Obama approved Governor Shumlin’s major disaster declaration , and although more than 700 fema employees and 1,300 National Guardsmen (including 724 from Vermont) responded to Vermont after Irene—airlifting 93 pallets of supplies to sixteen towns and trucking in another 334 pallets to forty-five other towns (to give a sense of the scale, a tractor-trailer truck can carry twenty-four of the four-foot by four-foot pallets)—Vermonters were working above and beyond to take care of their own. In Woodstock, Phil Camp managed to salvage a few of the Vermont 10 Shinn - Deluge.indb 144 6/5/2013 1:04:20 PM Onward 145 Standard’s computers from the muck that filled the weekly’s former headquarters, and Justin Macourt, a Woodstock local, removed the hard drives and managed to save 90 percent of the information stored on them. Later in the week, a local realtor who had never advertised with the weekly walked into the new office south of town, put a $2,000 check on Camp’s picnic table desk, and said, “You guys could use this.” Camp and his staff managed to get the Standard published by Friday—only two days late. Just west of Woodstock in Bridgewater Corners, the Ottauquechee had flooded the Long Trail Brewing Company’s property, but clean-up was quick. The brewery opened its doors to the community, offering free food—“good, hot comfort food,” said one local—and free Internet access in its popular pub. The brewery’s owners also chartered a helicopter to ferry supplies to isolated Rochester, and many brewery employees carried food into other isolated towns on their personal atvs. At Bethel Mills, Lang Durfee continued to take orders for building supplies even though the lumberyard had lost almost a half-million dollars in inventory, as well as its retail space. He worked shoulder to shoulder with employees, their families, friends, and neighbors to clear the lumberyard of destroyed inventory and mud—shoveling it into piles with snowplows. As he worked, Durfee thought about what his grandfather had told the wife of the lumber company’s owner in 1933 after the owner suddenly died, “You can always go bankrupt later. Let’s see what we can do right now.” In Rutland, more than two hundred people responded to Restoring Rutland’s request for volunteers to help clean up the hardest hit neighborhoods on Saturday, September 3. They swept streets and sidewalks of dried mud and helped homeowners remove flood debris from their lawns (without liability insurance, the organization could not allow volunteers to go inside people’s homes). Around the state, donations of food, supplies, and money kept pouring into relief organizations. Groups like the Chittenden Volunteer Fire Department continued to ferry donations into the now quasi-isolated towns (roads existed into the towns, but traveling those sometimes treacherous paths could take hours), and some groups began working together. Restoring Rutland’s Alexis Voutas, a Chittenden resident , asked Jan Sotirakis if the Chittenden Volunteer Fire Department’s Shinn - Deluge.indb 145 6/5/2013 1:04:20 PM 146 the rescue­ convoys could help distribute the vast amount of donated food and supplies that Restoring Rutland was receiving. Yes! replied Sotirakis. Volunteers drove carloads of Restoring Rutland’s donated supplies ten miles to the Chittenden Fire Station, where they were unloaded by more...