I don’t suppose there are too many Vermonters thinking of whitewater paddling right now. And they may too busy digging out mud. We returned home from a vacation in northern VT yesterday in the middle of the storm and things looked increasingly dire as we drove south.
The ground in northern VT was already saturated before the big t-storms came through on July 4th. The rivers stayed up the rest of the week as there was enough scattered afternoon thunderstorm activity to sustain it, leading us to postpone and then cancel a day trip on the Lamoille river because it was too high for the casual float we planned.
We were at Smuggler’s Notch, which was in an odd dry spot until late Sunday. By the time we went to bed, we had only got a little rain while the rest of VT was soaked. So I was surprised the next morning when the little brook running near our rental had turned into a raging torrent.
As we drove through the notch, we saw that the cliffs up above overlooking the notch had turned into huge waterfalls. It was an awesome sight and there was nobody up there to see it, so I kick myself for not stopping to snap a video, but I was thinking more about the health of the road and my windshield wiper than my family’s oohs and ahhs.
Down in Stowe where the Little River is a gentle stream that meanders between sandy banks on a normal day, it was roaring and stressing a road bridge. That’s about where my windshield wiper flew off. I had noticed it oddly tilted back in the notch. I had to drive in the rain down to Waterbury with no wiper on the driver’s side. At the Mobil station where I scored a new one, they were scrambling to move things to higher storage. We stopped for a nice lunch, and on our way out of Waterbury we could see the station already flooding.
As we departed on I-89 towards Montpelier, we followed the Winooski river, which was way out of its banks, putting parts of Rt 2 under water. At that point, we were pretty sure Montpelier was already flooded and just hoped we could pass through. Fortunately, I-89 was built with its valley mate in mind and carried us safely over the flood around the Montpelier water treatment plant.
After that, the highway climbs out of the valley away from danger. Further south, we noted closures of roads headed to central VT towns like Rutland, Killington, Ludlow, Woodstock. They supposedly got it worse than what we saw around Montpelier.
The total damage from this storm could be bigger than Irene because the heavy rains were over a wider area.
