Last night…
I am writing this at 8pm on 10 July. Guess what is happening… one year to the day… We’re having another 100-year flood. This time from Beryl. My son’s town is being evacuated, but they are closing roads so fast he doesn’t know how to get out. My garage has three inches of water purely because the drain pipe can’t keep up with the flow. There isn’t much coming into the basement yet, but this is supposed to keep going all night. There are tornados all around and sirens and Main Street is apparently closed because all the traffic is being diverted up to my street.
This morning’s paper was a retrospective, talking about the homes and businesses that still haven’t recovered from last year. Whole neighborhoods on the north end of my town are flood recovery buy-out ghost towns still. We’re still opening business flood loans at work because it has taken this long to creep through the insurance maze and tally up what was lost — and then figure out what to do next. There are roads that hadn’t yet made it onto the repair list. The one in front of my office ends about 100 meters away from our building — in a sink hole that took out the entire road.
That a flood-producing storm would hit exactly here in exactly a year’s time is unfathomable… yet here we are…
Flood Update…
I am angry that I have to post this exact heading on July 11th, 2024, as on July 11th, 2023. Could we now possibly do something about NOT MAKING THINGS CONTINUALLY WORSE?
My rain gauge had 6 inches in it this morning. Not completely full like last year, so maybe it stopped at six. There is water in my basement and the high water mark in the garage looks to be about 4 inches. I was lucky in that I had taken delivery on mulch on Monday and the pile was blocking half the entrance on the uphill side of my property’s tilt. This obviously didn’t keep the water out of the garage, but it did slow the stream enough that it couldn’t carry debris in that would block the drain. The water was flowing out the entire time. (It was a fountain off the side of the building where the drainpipe ends.) But there was too much flowing in for a 4 inch pipe to manage.
The worst of the weather happened at about midnight last night. The road on the side of my house was actually a river. (Heading straight down for my garage…) The waters were actually raging. (I don’t get to use that description very often…) I was worried for my car which was parked at the curb (because flooded garage…). The water topped the curb, but it didn’t get any higher, so the car’s electrical system stayed dry. (Ish…) We also had a breach in the actual river, but not the sustained flooding of last year.
However this year, we had all the other trappings of a storm — fierce lightning, rumbling thunder and multiple tornados. The weird thing about the tornados is that these were the only wind we had. Where there wasn’t a tornado, the rain was coming straight down. Many things in my garden are flattened today from the pummeling, but no trees came down. I am sure I was lucky in that. Even on my drive home last night, I saw some of the storm’s work and the poor guys who were trying to shift downed limbs off power lines. My house did not lose power that I know of. My son’s town, six miles south of here, still has no power. But the town was evacuated about ten minutes before the power went down, and his fridge is sort of empty, so powerlessness is not a big deal today. On the other hand, it took him almost two hours to navigate the road closures to get here. He made it safely. If a bit shaken and damp.
Still, this flood was not as destructive as last year’s because the Winooski River only breached for a short time last night. It is also not as destructive because, frankly, there isn’t as much to destroy now. For example, my basement has just as much standing water as last year, but only a couple wet rugs that are already drying outside, as much as that is possible. (It is still very humid and there is more rain in the forecast today… though it might dry out on the weekend.) But this was not because there weren’t waterfalls down my foundation; it’s because there was nothing left after last year’s water and then mold fiasco.
Downtown is blocked off today. There are pumps whining, so there are basements down there that are flooded, though again, probably not much harm except mess. I do wonder about the corner pub whose building is at the low point of downtown and whose kitchen is still in the basement. Hopefully, they put out sandbags, but if even a little water gets in they have to toss anything for consumption. Which is better than last year. They were closed for months while they rebuilt the entire kitchen. (Still in the basement… because they don’t have another space…)
My neighbor says there are lakes at the two intersections out of our neighborhood heading into downtown. One guy stopped by at 6:30am as I was cleaning up my garage mess and asked if I knew of any roads around Main Street that were open. Presumably he had tried many already. I said probably not from what I could hear of earth moving equipment and sirens. He sighed and said he’d be parking his car and walking to work — at an automotive repair garage… I wished him luck and privately thought that there was little chance that the garage was unscathed and even less chance that any repair customers would be able to get there in a car.
I am tired… but mostly I am angry. How much destruction do we have to endure before we finally admit that our way of living doesn’t work? It is not living, it is coping… with ever mounting levels of damage. And what we in central Vermont experienced of Hurricane Beryl — which traveled the entire width of the continent between here and the Gulf of Mexico, by the way — is slight compared to what happened to those closer to warm waters. Is this really necessary? Do we really need to keep killing ourselves for the sake of a few more dollars for billionaires?
I will go off to work today. Maybe… We’re on a delayed opening. I will see if I can actually get there closer to when I have to leave. And, believe me, I am not going to make much of an effort to find a circuitous route. If the roads I usually travel are blocked, then I am not going. Because this putting in effort to go create wealth for rich people is the problem. The rich people can bloody well deal with loss of profit today while all of us recover from their harm.
What we really need right now is to create spaces and support systems for those who do not have the privilege of taking off work (paid or otherwise) and keeping a job. If you know someone who can’t miss work even in an emergency, find a way to make it so they can — whether this means giving them money and assistance or, better, working in your community to build new systems so they can stay afloat in flood times — and into the recovery beyond. It is high time we remember that work is meant to support lives — and only that. Lives are not meant to be wasted on a “labor force”. Further, we need to recognize that if we continue this sham laboring, there will be no lives to waste. We have the choice of stopping now in as controlled a collapse as we can contrive — or we keep going and this whole system will die and take most of us along with it. Is that really a choice?
That it seems to be a difficult decision to make for most of the people with the means to make it is what is making me incandescent with rage this morning…
