Uncharted Floodwaters
Recovering, Rebuilding, and Adapting in Montpelier
“I can’t believe what we’ve seen in North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s unbearable to watch the video and photography! We have to have these regional conversations to literally survive what climate change is bringing to our future.”
In July 2023 my husband and I had a harrowing drive on Interstate 89 in Vermont returning home from a family trip to southern New England. Relentless rains poured from the sky at an alarming rate, clouds exploded with water, and winds rattled the car. Visibility was nearly zero as we crawled alongside other travelers, often coming to a stop because we couldn’t see. The ride was more intense than any snowstorm we’d ever traveled through.
All around us ditches and culverts overflowed as the streams and lands uphill couldn’t contain the water. Washouts were eerily close, as shoulders along the highway collapsed into sinkholes. We crept north through Montpelier while officials closed the highway behind us. We made it home intact but with raw nerves, knowing we are among the lucky—so far. Too many have lost businesses, homes, and habitats due to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
Exactly one year later, in July 2024, many of the same Vermont communities rushed to prepare and then stood agape while Hurricane Beryl destroyed places still recovering from the 2023 flood, and wreaked havoc in new areas. While Montpelier was spared in the 2024 flood, Plainfield, an economically challenged community with a huge heart, now faces a long-term recovery. Residents there “are leaning in on humor and traditions to support each other,” while also navigating federal aid and other types of support.
The 2024 flood had a devastating impact in Plainfield, Vermont. Courtesy of Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience
One has to wonder, but not dwell on, how we all could be better prepared for these catastrophic events. Vermont is no longer the safe haven it once was for those escaping climate change—neither are Asheville, Boone, and other communities in Appalachia that lost so much in Hurricane Helene. It will take years for these areas to dig out, salvage, and rebuild. As I research and write this article, the news of Hurricane Milton’s destructive path through central Florida is making headlines. Spain is reeling from rains that washed bridges, streets, cars, and many loved ones away. And remember Katrina, and Maria, and Sandy, and Irene. The media pays attention to these climate change events for a few days, but communities are left rebuilding for months and years, while fearing and knowing the rains will come again. “We are all vulnerable to the flooding and storm damage from weather events; it can happen anywhere,” Jon Copans, Director of the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience, said.
Downtown Montpelier after flooding. Courtesy of Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience
We humans are late for some very important dates. Dates with our local, regional, state, and federal policymakers, our river engineers, our educators, our bankers, and our insurance providers. Climate scientists, activists, ecologists, and meteorologists feel ignored by policy makers as they see weather patterns reaching new levels of strength and impact as predicted. However, it is notable that as devastation across the planet reaches record proportions, architects of our global finance system are finally tuning in to try to figure out how we are going to pay for all this damage. It has been calculated that for every dollar spent on prevention, six dollars are spent on post-recovery work, making it hard to argue with prevention investments.
New normal. If we are late for these important dates, how do we catch up? This isn’t a game or a whimsical story; these are the real lives of business owners, families, and individuals who are trying together to find the energy and resources to rebuild and guard against the “next time.”
Towns in Vermont are in charge of their land use choices—from housing density to culvert maintenance, to commercial districts, and more. According to a Vermont Public Brave Little State episode (which was, ironically, in production as Montpelier was flooding in 2023, and was re-broadcast in July 2024 after Beryl’s onslaught), there is a centuries-long arc toward land use patterns being what they are today. The devastating impacts we now experience are in part the consequences of land use patterns that did not predict the impacts of climate change. How quickly can communities and lawmakers respond to climate change devastations by considering changes to land use patterns and regulations to build a new form of resilience? What do community members need to recover, rebuild, and care for each other? How do communities share resources and knowledge? What role does conservation play?
“We are all vulnerable to the flooding and storm damage from weather events; it can happen anywhere.”
Katie Trautz, Executive Director at Montpelier Alive, considers most of these questions as she leads her organization toward rebuilding a healthy and resilient local economy in the capital city of Vermont. By fall 2024 most businesses in Montpelier had recovered enough to rebuild and reopen, but many homes impacted in 2023 have still not been fully restored. There is an underlying anxiety, according to Trautz, and the business community can only do so much. “We are all facing the ongoing assault of weather events, with some areas and people far more vulnerable than others,” she said. There is much work to be done on policies and practices upstream and downstream of Montpelier to change where and how much water flows through the city, which affects both residents and businesses.
Trautz, a native Vermonter and a professional musician with a young family, stepped into her role as Executive Director at Montpelier Alive just a few months before the flooding of 2023. She immediately leaned in with a full commitment to bringing people together to get through these rough times. She feels and sees a collective sense of urgency bordering on panic when a new storm is predicted in town. Business owners are tapped and don’t have the resources to “do this again.”
Trautz defines the leadership role of Montpelier Alive as that of a weaver—bringing together the diverse threads of community to hold conversations and make connections to build the resilience that help businesses overcome future impacts of flooding and climate change. “The core of bouncing back from crises is a strong and well-knit support system. What can be done when the label of ‘that flood town’ sticks? We’ve got work to do,” she said. “We are all in this together—from Asheville, North Carolina, to Plainfield, Vermont—and we must learn from each other.”
On July 11, 2023, a boat was the only way to move through the streets of Montpelier. Courtesy of Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience
Diverse regional and national resources are of utmost importance. While a few business owners had some Irene and COVID monies left over, many have had to take out new loans. “There just isn’t the ability for people and businesses to go further into debt to rebuild if this keeps happening,” Trautz added.
The Montpelier Commission for Recovery & Resilience works alongside Montpelier Alive to build resilience strategies. Copans guides the Commission’s multi-pronged focus, including:
1. identifying and supporting the most effective flood mitigation measures;
2. developing the Montpelier Action Plan for Local Emergency;
3. developing a river edge master plan for Montpelier that will “reassess the town’s river corridors, and take measures where possible to redesign those areas to better contain, absorb, dissipate, and recover from flood waters;”
4. engaging/hosting regional conversations; and
5. surveying downtown buildings to identify what can make them more flood resilient.
The Commission recently held a forum on the draft emergency plan and is bringing together “the expertise and stakeholders to look at the scale of prevention—from an entire watershed to the local municipalities,” Copans explained.
“We are all facing the ongoing assault of weather events, with some areas and people far more vulnerable than others.”
Natural solutions build resilience and aid recovery. What can be done to keep these catastrophic weather events from decimating communities over and over? How do communities adapt? How can communities in New England and beyond learn from each other? What does the natural landscape underneath our built environments show and tell us? Local communities like Montpelier can do their part to stay strong economically, but they can’t be successful unless work is done upstream and downstream in the watershed. The rain needs somewhere to go.
The best way to consider solutions to just about anything is to see it as part of a whole. New England is a largely forested landscape, and it has a rich history of conservation following widespread clearing in the nineteenth century. Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities offers a vision that would increase this conservation, protecting Wildlands and managed forest on both public and private lands. The lands directly north of Montpelier include the headwaters of the North Branch of the Winooski River, which have potential to support flood resilience, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and many other benefits.
“The earth’s soils and vegetation, turned back over to Nature, can absorb excess water, over time, and maybe just in time.”
Preventing floods can include restoring floodplains and wetlands; making changes to stormwater and runoff regulations; adjusting logging practices upstream of communities living in river basins (and valleys); and protecting and enlarging drainage basins. And it can mean finding alternative places for housing.
Humans are claiming more and more of Nature for development and resource extraction. It is a custom deeply entrenched and encoded in modernity. So, how do land use and the ecology of place, as well as the relationships within and between wildlands, woodlands, farmlands, and communities play a role? What are we getting right? What are we getting wrong? How can a conservation systems approach guide us as we respond to flooding events? Mike Klein is a river ecologist in Vermont who was unable to get back to his home in Middlesex in 2023, and couldn’t leave his home in 2024 because of the flooding. He was cut off each time. “We know water can be very destructive, taking out roads and homes while eroding hillsides that destabilize the landscape for the next event,” he said in the Brave Little State episode mentioned above.
If Vermont and other regions don’t urgently update land use regulations and implement restoration practices, flooding will continue to happen, with devastating impacts. It takes time to implement practices such as leaving forests alone to rewild so their natural growth holds more water. New rules and regulations also take a long time to change, given how bureaucracies often work. Local, state, federal, and private collaboratives and partnerships have potential, but as author Stephen Covey said, “change happens at the speed of trust.”
As was said in the Brave Little State episode, a restoration project today can return rivers and streams to very different shapes than what we see today. According to Copans, a watershed or regional approach could and should be used, but that is difficult to do in Vermont where the local governing and regulating bodies work on only two levels: towns and the state. “We’ve got to be able to bring municipalities together at the regional scale where we can make the most difference to the landscape and land use patterns. No one has jurisdiction at the regional level,” Copans said. “It’s an opportunity to bring municipalities around the table. This requires patience alongside the urgency because towns are not used to working together.”
“The core of bouncing back from crises is a strong and well-knit support system. We are all in this together—from Asheville, North Carolina, to Plainfield, Vermont—and we must learn from each other.”
Learning from each other and Nature. To accept the water that these climate change-caused weather events are producing, the problem of flooding can be addressed by re-establishing Nature’s natural elements. The earth’s soils and vegetation, turned back over to Nature, can absorb excess water, over time, and maybe just in time.
Perhaps we humans could solve some of these problems by showing up on time, working collaboratively across streets and aisles, and following Nature’s lead more closely. The resilience of communities like Montpelier and Plainfield depend upon this work as extreme weather events become, indeed, the new normal.
Normal flow conditions, Winooski River at Essex Dam. Photo © Liz Thompson
July 2023 flood, Winooski River at Essex Dam. Photo © Liz Thompson
Nadine Canter is a disrupter, threshold walker, and bridge builder. Her inquiries are rooted in “we”—the puzzles of unity and holism to re-weave humans back into the Earth story. She is located in Vermont, where she serves as an advisor, a tai chi chuan and daoism student, and a lecturer at Middlebury College. Her mission is to create as many ripples as possible by bringing human and nonhuman mycelial networks to her teaching and advising. Her most important work has been to raise two humans who are working in service to change the story.