Recent flooding in Vermont has forced many residents to evacuate or shelter in place. “Few parts of the state were spared, but the valleys were hardest hit,” Sue Halpern writes.
Photograph by John Tully / The Washington Post / GettyOn Sunday evening, rain began to fall in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where I live. By early the next morning, water was carving rivulets into my dirt driveway, and it seemed a portent of what was going to happen to the state’s nearly nine thousand miles of dirt roads—one of them mine.
When I checked a few hours later, the Ompompanoosuc had risen forty feet. It was high enough to flood low-lying areas on either side of it, forcing many residents to evacuate. Thankfully, the river is held back by a hundred-and-seventy-foot dam that—unlike many smaller dams in the state—was unlikely to overflow, and my daughter was fine.
On social media, people around the state were posting what by now have become familiar images of devastation in an era of extreme weather: submerged cars, flooded buildings, roads that had washed away. This time felt different—not only because they showed places I knew well but because they were from a mountain state far from the sea, not some coastal city threatened by rising seas and storm surges.
Some of the storm’s most dramatic scenes have played out in Montpelier, the state capital, where water cascaded over the banks of the Winooski River, poured down the main street, and made the lawn of the statehouse look like a beachfront. Hour by hour, the water behind the Wrightsville dam, north of town, climbed.
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