Flooding impacts on rural Vermont

Though Vermont is known as a very rural state, I haven't seen much coverage of this week's flooding there that used the word "rural."  So I was happy (is that the right adjective?) to see this story from Vermont Digger, posted on July 13, that does just that.  The headline is "When you can’t get there from here: In rural areas, road closure updates hard to find."  The subhead is "From cardboard signs to Google Maps, information has been crowd-sourced and ad hoc."  Kristen Fountain reports, and the lede follows.

It was the talk of the porch at the Craftsbury General Store on Tuesday morning and inside the town office across the street: What was the best way, if there was one, of getting out of town?

Both locations were up and running on generators, though power was out. The noise drew neighbors like moths to light, seeking coffee and news.

Like many other small towns across the state, residents of Craftsbury and nearby towns — Glover, Greensboro, Hardwick, Woodbury and Wolcott among them —- woke to find that active flooding or major water damage had closed the usual travel routes along state roads. The conversation quickly turned to finding workarounds on the area’s network of local roads.

Those who arrived in cars offered up intel about which ones had deep standing water or were only partially washed out.

“It was definitely chaotic. A lot of people with a lot of information” were stopping by and calling, recalled Craftsbury Town Clerk Michelle Warren on Wednesday morning. Later, once power was restored for the senders, there were emails, too. “There were some roads we didn’t realize how bad it was until we saw pictures,” she said.

Officials in other towns posted lists of open and closed roads on their websites or Facebook pages and on Front Porch Forum groups, which worked to some degree.

Warren was grateful to have the help of a volunteer with geographic mapping experience on Tuesday to create a digital map where all that information could be recorded and shared via the town website. The tool has allowed her to update residents and travelers daily since then on where the town road crew and locals with excavators and dump trucks have made progress shoring up washouts.

One town that has been very much in the news in the wake of the flooding is Ludlow, population 773.  Here's some New York Times coverage with lots of photos of Ludlow, as well as other hard-hit towns in Central Vermont.  The lede for that story highlights familiar stereotypes of the region:

Vermont, a state known for peaceful green mountains, grazing cows and tidy covered bridges, is not often seen as a place where mudslides threaten highways, rivers churn with debris and murky, propane-fouled floodwaters fill downtown streets.

Another town getting a lot of attention in national coverage is Barre, population 8,000. 

Prior posts about Vermont are here, and this post in particular discusses the 2011 Vermont floods resulting from Tropical Storm Irene, as well as the historic 1927 flood.