As Seen In Recent Years, Vermont Horribly Vulnerable To Climate-Boosted Floods; Residents, Government Wrangle Next Steps
After floodwaters surged through the center of Plainfield, Vermont, on July 10, 2023, and into the basement of the apartment building he owned, Arion Thiboumery wasted no time in tackling the mess. He mucked out the basement, hauled damaged goods to the dump, and started mulling how he’d brace for the next flood. “My thinking was, ‘Okay, a 100-year flood is now a 10-year flood; I’ve got to see if there’s additional shoring up I need to do,’” he recalls. Exactly one year from that date, Plainfield awoke to new scenes of destruction. The Mill Street bridge over the Great Brook had been swept away, and most of Thiboumery’s building had collapsed into the stream, now swollen with 5 inches of rain. Dozens of homes were damaged or destroyed.
As the local coordinator for homeowners applying for buyouts with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — which has over the past decade approved more than 160 buyouts throughout Vermont — Thiboumery is now helping Plainfield residents avoid future floods and figure out where they might go next. “We lost a third of our village,” Thiboumery says. “When you lose a big piece of [the] center of your town, it really is like: ‘What is our identity?’”
That’s a question that a growing number of storm-wracked communities around the Green Mountain State — and across the country, from western North Carolina to Louisiana and the West Coast — are now asking. How to respond to the threat of future flooding has become particularly urgent in Vermont, which has already seen its annual average rainfall increase by 6 inches since the 1960s. This tiny, rural state has a higher share of homes and buildings in vulnerable floodplains than most other states. And its residents face a daunting long-term regional forecast: With climate change continuing to intensify, one recent study forecast that extreme precipitation events will increase by 52 percent across the Northeast by 2100. What’s more, many live on the front lines of a rapidly mounting threat: the distinct havoc wrought by severe downpours in steep terrain. When heavy rain hits the state’s mountain slopes and flows downhill, water has nowhere to go but through narrow river valleys — and the hundreds of settlements clustered close to them.
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Vermont is a small state, home to just 650,000 people. But even so, the scale of required flood-proofing is overwhelming. Take culverts, for example. In 2018, a group called Friends of the Mad River launched a culvert replacement project in the town of Fayston that took four years to complete, drew funding from seven different state and federal sources, and cost half a million dollars. (The project was managed to completion by another group, Friends of the Winooski River.) By one estimate, nearly 13 percent of the state’s 112,000 culverts need upgrading or replacement. Add in hundreds of bridges that need to be elevated, redesigned, or removed, thousands of homes that need to be bought out and demolished, and thousands of people who will need assistance finding new places to live, and one starts to get a sense of the scope of the challenge.
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https://e360.yale.edu/features/vermont-floods