The story of Noah’s Ark, with its 40 days and 40 nights of rain followed by an epic flood, may well be resonating with Vermonters today, for that is pretty much what they have endured over the past month and a half. The cause of their misery, of course, is not divine retribution but the catastrophic consequences of man-made climate change: Warmer air supercharged with moisture that produces sudden, intense rainfall. Combined with slow moving weather fronts, it is a prescription for disaster.
Thankfully, as of this writing the punishing storm that dropped two months worth of rain in two days on parts of the state has mostly spared human life: A Barre, Vt., man drowned. And the Upper Valley appears to have weathered the storm and subsequent flooding relatively well, although the effects varied widely among towns. Federal disaster aid has been authorized. And, as usual in times of trouble, Vermonters pulled together to help each other out.
But that is about the extent of the good news. Gov. Phil Scott called the flood damage “historic and catastrophic,” noting that thousands of people lost their homes and businesses. Montpelier and Barre were especially hard hit, as was the Ludlow-Londonderry-Andover area. Countless roads across the state were washed out. Swift-water rescue teams and National Guard helicopters had to be deployed to save people from dangerous situations. The physical, fiscal and psychological recovery will be long and arduous.
Perhaps most alarming of all is that this storm followed by only 12 years Tropical Storm Irene, which wrought then-unprecedented damage in Vermont in 2011 and was thought at the time to be a 50- or 100-year storm. Water levels in some of the state’s rivers last week exceeded even those of Irene. That these extreme weather events are on their way to becoming the terrible new normal can perhaps be inferred from the fact that this storm was not even dignified by a name to separate it from its predecessor and probable successors. Scott called it Irene 4.0.
Also discouraging is the fact that the state made heroic efforts to increase its resiliency in the wake of Irene, reshaping the flow of rivers, buying homes from people living in flood zones and installing bigger culverts, among other things. While some of those measures mitigated the impact of the latest storm, clearly a lot more needs to be done. This the federal government seems to recognize. The infrastructure bill passed in 2021 provides about $50 billion for such projects.
Even so, there is a natural limit to resilience. Topography is destiny in many ways: It is nearly impossible to contain torrents of water flowing down mountains into rivers and small valleys. As Joe Flynn, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation, put it, “Mother Nature always wins.”
Mathew Sanders, who leads state resilience efforts for the Pew Charitable Trusts, has a slightly more optimistic view. “We sort of need to re-imagine what the most strategic interventions are going to be,” he told The New York Times.
In our view, the most effective strategic intervention is political. All of us can demand that lawmakers at the state and federal level make combating climate change the centerpiece of their efforts, by accelerating the pace of transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. For all of us who want coming generations to live in some semblance of the world we were lucky enough to inherit, the call to accelerated action is deafening. Until it is answered, we’re going to continue to catch hell in the form of high water.