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

8 | Vermont Ingenuity and Volunteerism

vermont ingenuity and volunteerism Irene gave every guy who had a tractor the opportunity to tell his wife why he bought the tractor. We joke about it, but that’s the thing that pulled us through. That and the fact that every one of our towns had two to three contractors with a lot of heavy equipment who were on the road even while the rain was falling. c  Mel Adams, flood recovery special projects manager for the town of Killington by tuesday, government officials had a better sense of the state of the state. And the numbers were staggering. At least a portion of every highway in Vermont, except for I-89 and I-91, was closed—with a total of 146 separate state road segments washed out or collapsed, and 531 total miles (a quarter of the network) closed. Additionally, VTrans closed thirty-four bridges, and another two hundred were damaged. Those numbers didn’t include damage to town roads, where an additional 2,260 road segments were damaged and 175 segments closed, including ninety bridges. Because of the immense amount of road damage, people remained trapped in thirteen towns: Marlboro, Wardsboro, Stratton, Cavendish, Plymouth, Killington, Mendon, Pittsfield, Strafford, Stockbridge , Rochester, Hancock, and Granville. Nine of these towns sit along Route 100, nestled in the middle of the Green Mountain Range. Each town faced myriad problems. With no power to pump water from wells, municipal water and sewer lines severed, and surface water sources compromised by floodwater polluted with propane, gasoline, heating oil, and sewage, people in the isolated towns had no drinking water. Food supplies were running low because they had no power to 8 Shinn - Deluge.indb 110 6/5/2013 1:04:19 PM Vermont Ingenuity & Volunteerism 111 run refrigerators and freezers, so perishables were rapidly spoiling. And anyone experiencing a medical emergency had to hope there was a doctor either living or stranded in town. The situation in the mountains seemed desperate. “I think it’s probably a very scary thing to not know when you can get out of town and to have a water system that’s not working and a general store that has run out of bottled water,” Mark Bosma, spokesman for the Vermont Division of Emergency Management, told a New York Times reporter . “People are extremely nervous about being isolated.” VTrans made it their number one priority to reconnect these isolated communities and decided to redeploy its forces into two primary incident command centers—one in Rutland, the other in Dummerston. (A third incident command center set up in Berlin directed road, bridge, and railroad repairs in northern Vermont, which was far less affected by Irene.) Sleep was no longer part of the program. “It was a pretty big decision to totally redeploy our forces,” said Sue Minter, then deputy secretary of VTrans. “But I think it was the most important decision.” To those on the outside, the sense of urgency grew throughout Monday and swelled on Tuesday. cvps made a corporate decision to do whatever it took to restore power to customers: they would reach customers by any means possible. Greg White, director of engineering and system operations at cvps, hiked five miles into Rochester (and back out again) to evaluate damage to the destroyed substation. Ben Bemis, Royalton operations supervisor, rode his off-road motorcycle to assess damage in Rochester. And three employees—Duane Dickinson, Tim Madore, and Charlie Daigneault—mountain biked into Wardsboro and West Jamaica . Where linemen couldn’t get trucks in to replace washed-out and broken power poles, they tacked power lines (on insulators) to trees.* “People have enough problems not being able to get in and out of their hometowns,” said cvps spokesperson Steve Costello. “We’ve at least got to be able to get them power back.” *For its response to Irene, CVPS received the Edison Electric Institute’s 2011 Energy Recovery Award, the electric industry’s highest honor for storm recovery. EEI president Thomas Kuhn credited the utility for its preparation, planning, and plan execution, as well as CVPS employees ’ “uncommon ingenuity and dedication to customers,” in allowing the company to restore power quickly, in many cases before the towns and homes were accessible by road. Shinn - Deluge.indb 111 6/5/2013 1:04:19 PM 112 the rescue Across the state, volunteer groups sprang up on Facebook. Frustrated because she could not find a place to...