One Year Later, Vermont Floods Again

A year to the day after the devastating floods of July 10, 2023, Vermont was hit hard again. The remnants of Hurricane Beryl, the earliest category 5 hurricane ever recorded, met a stalled warm front to deliver a band of tropical, torrential rain that dumped up to seven inches across parts of the state in just about twelve hours.

This July, the damage was far less widespread than last, but in a few of the bad spots, it was just as bad. Barre, which sits right next to the capital, Montpelier, and was flooded badly last year—but is generally poorer and thus received less attention—was flooded for several hours, leaving a nice thick mess of silt and mud on the streets and requiring a boil-water advisory for the city water system. Plainfield, a few miles up the Winooski River, suffered considerably worse damage than last year, where an apartment building known as the Heartbreak Hotel fell into the river. Farther east, in the town of Peacham, a thirty-three-year-old man died when his UTV was swept away by floodwater.

Other bad spots are too numerous to list, and probably too regional to mean much to people who haven’t spent time here. The Mad River flooded in Moretown; I received a VT-Alert at 1:06 AM announcing that the village was being evacuated. The Winooski flooded in Richmond—again, the photos eerily similar to those exactly one year earlier. The urban farms of Burlington’s intervale—the first place I ever farmed, where one farmer told stories about harvesting by canoe during the 2011 inundations from Hurricane Irene—were flooded for the second year in a row (and the canoes were back), likely catastrophically ruining yet another farm season that had barely begun.

This comes amid what will almost certainly be the hottest summer on record up here, where those inches of rain provided no reprieve from another long bout of persistent and oppressive humidity that is making northern New England miserable. The flooding also hits the state with perhaps the second-highest homelessness rate in the country, a crisis this disaster is bound to worsen again.

For people outside Vermont this latest episode may be of minimal interest—another climate-worsened event to briefly absorb, then forget. No dramatic pictures of people kayaking by the state capitol this time. The damage didn’t even warrant a mention the following morning on the New York Times’ home page, which barely found room to note the impacts of Beryl’s initial landfall and the overwhelmed Houston healthcare system, the inevitable product of one more American city that is becoming functionally uninhabitable when the power grid goes down.

But people should pay attention. Because the destruction up here is a reminder of the illusion of the “climate refuge,” just as Biden’s incapacity and the obvious stakes of this election should not delude us that we’re seriously voting for a livable planet or not; the critical decisions about “livability” were made decades ago, and the extreme heat we’re living is well baked into the present and future.

Catastrophic climate change is here, from Europe to India to Greece to New Mexico to supposedly resilient New England. “Green” technology is not going to get us out of this mess, and the Democrats, whichever Democrat, certainly won’t either. Organizing, degrowth, mutual aid and solidarity, and a renewed ecological consciousness—these are some of the only things that might help.