Vermont Flood changed everything. The discussion about the importance of floodplains matters. The fact is that a lot of the floodplain in Vermont is fairly intact, and it did hold and absorb a lot of water. But there is another dimension: a lot of that floodplain was for agricultural crops. Many vegetable farms suffered significant losses, and that has had a significant impact on the amount of locally produced food. Many other farms that had fields of grass and corn for livestock lost a cutting of grass or, in some cases, the entire crop of corn. The bottom line is that the effects of climate-induced flooding consist of so many cascading layers of impact.
There are plenty of friends who want to share real-time experiences; here are a few:
Real Experiences of Vermont Flood
I recall the aftermath of Katrina—the poor people were ignored and forgotten there as well. We need better low-income housing, and it starts with being located in better areas. I live in Dallas, where the poorest people were shoved into floodplains and kept there by generations of official discrimination, followed by decades of politicians not wanting to admit that the end of formal segregation didn’t end the injustices created by it.
Up until a few years ago, this area of Pennsylvania was more or less safe. But we had three tornadoes (two in the same storm) touch down less than a mile from my house; our wildfire risk remains at a perpetual high; and my backyard, on a mountaintop, has been flooding so much that we have permanent sink holes now. There really is no winning, and the people who should truly be held responsible for hurting our planet will likely never truly suffer the way the rest of us will. I’m so angry and heartbroken and terrified, and I don’t know what to do.
I was a pizza delivery driver in Monpelier for years; it’s always so devastating to see the results of the flood on a landscape and in a city so ingrained and familiar that I had dreams of driving its streets for years after I moved. I know that mobile home community; I brought pizzas there. I can only hope that the people of my home can continue to recover and that their plans for resilience to floods are enacted before the next one.
I moved out of Northern California decades ago due to climate concerns. I looked all over the country and picked the Colorado Front Range. I am still very happy with the situation. Low humidity will be critical, and the growing season is already getting longer. The high today is 57F, but the historical average is 42F, and our nighttime lows are seeing similar gaps, so this isn’t a fluke. A few years ago, I was seeing 5F consistently above average, but it really jumped this year.
Back in my early 20s, I worked on exactly this issue in northern Vermont, with Montpelier being within my work area. There are lots of discussions with town planning commissions, conservation commissions, large landowners, etc. about a variety of topics, a major one being upper watershed management, rightsizing road culverts, and adapting infrastructure within the towns. I’d meet with the various parties, get them onboard, and connect them with the resources and agencies so they could take the next steps.
Unfortunately, people being as they are, often people and agencies didn’t follow through, and simple, cost-effective solutions were often not adopted.
One thing that can be done in a place where people know it floods but you can’t move away is to move up. Mobile homes, especially, can be raised on stilts. It’s something people in flood-prone areas around the world do to keep their homes safe from the high water. If the water goes under your home rather than into it, you don’t get damage. Educating insurance companies that paying to raise these kinds of homes means money spent now and more money saved later when these homes are not damaged in a flood. If floods really are going to happen more often, the best way to deal with the high water is to be above it.
Due to past actions, our current and future options for avoiding these kinds of events are basically to build everything on solid rock, away from rivers, lakes, hills, mountains, oceans, open grassland, and forests. Due to climate change, extreme weather will be a more common occurrence, and it will cause floods, mudslides, flash floods, and fires. In Northern Climes, it is likely that a more saturated atmosphere will lead to extreme snowfall on occasion that can lead to shoddily built houses collapsing and for even well-built houses to be cut off from the rest of the world for days on end until the snowplows have managed to catch up.
For us in the more developed world, this will all be an inconvenience. For people in poorer areas of the world, where your next meal depends on a good harvest, this sort of weather will be deadly.
Frankly, there was no excuse for this. After Hurricane Irene, 12 years ago, Vermont was given a loud wake-up call that Vermonters could not continue to take Mother Nature for granted, and yet, even after the destruction of Irene, Vermont did not seriously move to abandon low-lying areas prone to flooding and rebuild on higher ground.
It’s time for Vermont to understand that the old ways of life are gone and must not be continued. It is time to move away from the current property tax structure toward land value taxation, and Vermonters should long ago have begun to relocate town centers that are vulnerable to flooding to higher ground. The current tax structure, by which VT obtains about 2/3rds of all property tax revenues from building values and only 1/3rd from land values, is the major obstacle to land use patterns that will be sustainable in the coming decades.
Some areas of very valuable land, like downtown Montpelier, will no longer be valuable, while other areas that are not currently valuable will suddenly see huge increases. We have had two 1000-year flood events within 12 years, and more will be coming. Move now. There is room for sentiment, but no room for sentimentality, in reorganizing our civilization around the new realities we have created for ourselves, Vermonters more than most. Vermonters are among the highest per capita users of fossil fuels in the nation because of the aging, poorly insulated, low-density building stock mostly heated with heavy fuel oils and the rural nature of the state, which requires vast expenditures on transportation fuels to be viable.
It will take not millions, not trillions, but gazillions to fix all the ways we have mucked up our rivers, land, and air. Just moving all housing from floodplains would cost trillions, just in the U.S.! This is why I am pessimistic about humanity’s future.