Hurricane Irene

[Abubob]

Vermont was really destroyed. The ENTIRE state complex in Waterbury, including the Emergency Management Office, was flooded and had to be torn down. I felt like a lot of folks not from VT did not understand how BAD it really was.

I had driven through Central Vermont 2 weeks before on an annual trip to Ohio and then 1 week later stopping in Rutland to see friends. I remember thinking how nice Rte 4 had turned out after years of reconstruction work. I was quite relieved the work was finally finished only to be wiped out the following week. Jaw dropping damage. NH had similar damage but not nearly the same scale.

 

[Zand]

I don't have any experiences from Irene that were that insane, but remember everything so vividly. That Saturday was supposed to be move in day for my junior year at LSC. They ended up pushing it back to Monday ahead of time, but allowed anyone to move in early in an emergency. My emergency was that all my shit was in the storage place behind the Lynburke which is right on the banks of the Passumpsic. So I left home at like 4:30am that Saturday to get there for 8. The RHD asked what my emergency was for coming up early and I was like...I don't want all my stuff getting ruined by floodwater but I'll just be moving it in and heading back to MA well before the storm sets in.

In central MA we lost power pretty early on Sunday for a couple hours but it was a pretty mild storm overall for us. I drove around a lot and saw a few branches down and we probably had a few gusts into the 50s and 60s but nothing worse than a typical noreaster. Reports from NYC where the storm made landfall didn't sound too bad, some storm surge flooding but all in all it seemed like we all dodged a bullet. Then that afternoon the videos started coming in from Vermont and suddenly "dodging a bullet" was no longer in play. Seeing the covered bridges wash away, the reports from places like Waterbury and Wilmington, and most of all seeing Jim Cantore lose his mind over the videos he was seeing from his home state while they made him hang around Brooklyn in a light breeze really hit it home that night.

I drove back up the next day, taking my usual route through Northfield MA and crossing the CT River into Bernardston to get on 91. I saw a ton of cars parked on the bridge, so I got out and the amount of debris floating down the river was insane. When I got up to Lyndonville I wasnt sure what to expect. Just in my time up there I saw countless floods (that would sometimes isolate us at LSC as both bridges out of Lyndon Center would be underwater) but I felt like this one would be worse. The redemption center said they had a few feet of water inside but they had already cleaned up and reopened within 24 hours. Overall the Passumpsic Valley appeared unscathed for the most part.

I didn't see the true damage until Halloween when I went to Killington after the October storm. The amount of ROOF damage on some of the houses in Woodstock and Bridgewater was insane. East Hill Road was still washed out at that point. To this day you can still see the scars on Rt 4 heading down to Rutland.

Of course 1 year later, Sandy would prove to be a whole different beast. Went to school with a lot of people from NJ, NYC, Long Island, etc who were affected by the storm. Someone we knew lived in Mantoloking which is on a barrier island between Seaside Heights and Point Pleasant. His whole town basically got washed away. We had gusts up to 70MPH at LSC during that storm, but 0 rain. The size of that storm after it became extratropical was insane.

The moral of the story is we had more Tropical Storms affect Vermont in my 4 years at LSC than we had snowstorms that exceeded 1 foot. March 7th 2011 we got 25-30" in about 15 hours. One of those ultra rare NEK jackpots.