Fairlee
“I thought it was a trailer truck,” said Ken Leclair, whose Lake Morey Road home lies right next to where Glen Falls Brook feeds into the west side of Lake Morey.
“You can’t hear much in this house, but you can hear the trailer trucks come and then go,” he said. “And this (sound) just kept coming and coming.”
Leclair said the oncoming sound was so loud that he walked outside of his house. It also occurred to him that it might be an airplane.
“If something was going to kill me, I wanted to see what it was,” he said.
Leclair said he was “shocked” to see a wall of water that he described as “4 feet tall and 12 feet wide” rushing down the course of the brook at “about 70 or 80 miles an hour.”
Fairlee Town Administrator Brian Hanson said the water that washed over Leclair’s back lawn eroded the land so much that “he lost probably 3 feet of his lawn, and flower gardens.”
The cause of the incident, which occurred shortly before 9 a.m., has not been determined, but “we’re thinking a beaver dam possibly might have let go. We haven’t got up there to check it,” Hanson said.
The brook originates in Fairlee Town Forest and runs easterly into Lake Morey, paralleling Bald Top Road for part of its route.
Although some debris was floating in the lake, Hanson said, there was no damage to the town beach at the south end of the lake.
Jim Flanders, a guest services worker at Lake Morey Resort, said he hadn’t noticed anything unusual in the water outside the resort.
“Sometimes we get beaver activity at the golf courses, but I haven’t heard anything today,” he said.
Leclair said no one was injured, and that there was no damage to the structure of his home.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.