Waterlogged in Vermont

Is this only the beginning?

Dear readers,

I am writing to you from the washed-out state of Vermont today, so this will be a very abbreviated Power Corridor – really just a brief note to reflect on what’s happened in recent days. Please tune in to Friday’s edition for a return to news normalcy (I hope).

Typically, when our local internet up here is on the fritz, it is because one of our more ambitious rodents gets into the telephone or power boxes again and makes a meal of the wires. Not so today, as Vermonters sit around, internet-less, nervously listening to their radios about how the Wrightsville Dam upstream from our state capital has been barely holding at maximum capacity. 

As I write this, it has been touch and go with my own internet connection, so I will be quick and just give you the broad strokes. 

Here in the Green Mountains, we’ve had some of the worst flooding since Hurricane Irene in 2011 – and, by some estimates, water levels not seen in nearly a century. The floodwaters filled our roadways surrounding the capital of Montpelier, trapping people in their homes and causing tens of millions of dollars in damage. (I expect that number will go up quickly.) The storms were described by The Boston Globe as “two months of rain in two days.”

Vermont state officials continue to report no serious injuries or fatalities, but swift water teams have undertaken more than 175 rescues. As reported earlier this week, one woman living in New York, near West Point, died after being swept away in the Northeast’s flash floods, while attempting to escape her home with her dog. She was later identified as 43-year-old Pamela Nugent, who lived in Orange County, New York, where the governor declared a state of emergency. 

The spring season in the Northeast was, indeed, unusually rainy and summer so far as well, so I can attest to the fact that many of us have been grousing for months about having to mow our lawns obsessively to keep up. But I don’t think any of us foresaw the historic rains that would lead to these floods, with Vermont’s state climatologist blaming it on climate change. 

Vermont is a state of complex topography, with many hills, valleys and ridges, so weather systems can get trapped in one spot and just sit there, as our climatologist Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux explains, until they “rain themselves out.” I expect the same is true for many other mountainous parts of New England and beyond.

Overall, New England has been seeing about 55 percent more extreme rain than it did in the 1950s. I can say that this has not boded well for keeping my backyard from turning into a veritable jungle every three days, if I don’t mow it. Not that I care in light of recent events, but I realize now it may have been a canary in the coalmine.

More seriously, it has resulted in some very scary flash flooding here and in many other states that is likely to continue.

It really does give one pause about whether there are some aspects of climate change that are very likely unstoppable, while others may still offer time to mitigate the extremity of the potential fallout. In the case of the latter, I sure hope it’s true. 

Signing off, for now, from waterlogged Vermont.

Leah McGrath Goodman

Editor, Power Corridor