Bristol, New Haven dig out, mop up
from flash flood
By Adam Silverman
Free Press Staff Writer
BRISTOL -- Shovels scraped
across muddy concrete. Shoes squished in soggy carpet.
Backhoes beeped and rumbled as they cleared debris from roads
and driveways.
Residents of Bristol and New Haven
began Sunday to clean out, scrape away and sop up the remnants
of a devastating flash flood that centered on the region the
night before. But even as residents and emergency crews toiled
under a blanket of humid haze to clean their battered towns, a
second round of thunderstorms began to develop.
No
injuries were reported after the wave of Saturday-night
storms. The flooding left several families homeless after
state building inspectors declared their houses unsafe. The
American Red Cross set up a shelter at Mount Abraham Union
High School in Bristol, a day after at least 50 stranded or
evacuated residents slept at shelters in Bristol, New Haven
and Middlebury.
Throughout Sunday, the cleanup effort
continued.
In Bristol, families and friends worked to
clear rocky, muddy debris from yards and houses, and to
staunch water that still flowed around and into homes. In New
Haven, residents marveled at the Little Otter Creek, which
rose to swallow a bridge, the Martin family driveway and most
of their front yard before pouring into their basement.
"We've never had trouble with water in 28 years,"
Denise Martin said as she wiped away a tear and watched her
husband, Ray, and son, Amos, stand on the ragged brink of
North Street and peer into the creek's raging water through a
void once covered by the bridge.
"It's just a shock,"
she said. "When you go away and come back to this -- it's a
little much."
The sky opens
Saturday's storm
began as a black cloud to the west at about 4 p.m. By 5 p.m.
an inky sky filled with thunder and lightening let go with
torrents of rain, residents said. The pounding rainfall kept
up its relentless pace for at least two hours, seeming to
focus on a narrow swath of central Vermont.
At least 5
inches fell within two hours, the National Weather Service in
South Burlington reported Sunday. Several local farmers with
rain gauges discussed precipitation that topped 8 inches.
The flooding that followed washed out roads, destroyed
bridges, pushed mountainsides into back yards and filled
basements, sheds and living rooms with water and mud. Water
formed its own paths down mountainsides and cascaded through
rising streams, creeks and tributaries. At least a dozen roads
were closed between the two communities, including
thoroughfares Vermont 116 and Vermont 17.
Emergency
crews from state agencies, local fire departments and
volunteers raced throughout the night and all day Sunday to
keep pace with the disaster, and the water that propelled it.
The effort will continue around the clock, organizers said
Sunday afternoon, until work no longer is necessary.
Rain and fallout
Kristi Bedard, 34, lives on
Mountain Street at the foot of the Hogback Mountains in
Bristol. Her neighborhood was among those hardest hit by the
flash floods.
"Everything just came in off the
mountain," her father, David Bedard, 55, said as he surveyed
the mud-covered rear of his daughter's house. "The whole
mountain's in the back yard now, I think."
The yard
looked like a still-life scene preserved in a lava floe. A
thick, rocky muck encased an outdoor bench nearly to its top.
A bicycle stood upright, buried to its handlebars in the ooze.
The asphalt driveway heaved and yawed as though an earthquake
had struck.
Evidence of the flood was plentiful in
town. A man with a shovel cleared mud from the sidewalk
leading to Bristol Elementary School's double doors. The
water's path left a trail of broken branches, tumbled rocks
and flattened grass throughout Bristol and New Haven. Portions
of a Bristol bank's parking lot disappeared into a deep hole.
On Mountain Terrace, Mike and Debra Brown worked under
the hot summer sun with about a dozen helpers to clear a
landslide-like mess from their yard and storage shed. The
couple were out Saturday celebrating their 30th wedding
anniversary; they returned home to find torrents of water
carving up their grass and gardens, and neighbors and friends
working frantically to stop it, Mike Brown said.
Debra
Brown said simply of the volunteers, "They're wonderful."
Outside the Martin home in New Haven, neighbors yelled
damage reports across the 10-foot gap in North Street over
Little Otter Creek, just south of Plank Road.
Amos
Martin, 24, said he watched Saturday night as the water rose,
flowed across the street, toppled a steel guardrail and,
finally, brought down the bridge itself. The creek still raged
in a wide, muddy torrent nearly a day later.
The
response
The flooding brought five state agencies and
at least seven local fire departments to Addison County, where
they and countless volunteers established a command post at
the Bristol Fire Station on North Street.
Road crews
criss-crossed the region in orange dump trucks, front-end
loaders and backhoes, working to stabilize crumbling streets
and culverts. Building inspectors visited damaged homes.
Transportation Agency employees encouraged sightseers to stay
away from the area because their presence slowed the progress
of emergency work.
Vermont Emergency Management was
evaluating whether the damage was extensive enough to allow a
federal disaster declaration. The threshold is $1 million,
said Deputy Director Duncan Higgins.
Gov. Jim Douglas
toured the towns Sunday morning.
For many, the
flooding triggered memories of similar storms that tore
through central Vermont in 1998 and caused damage in nine
towns, including Bristol. People such as Harris Brassard, a
72-year-old who has lived in Bristol most of his life,
experienced both storms and said the 1998 flood was far weaker
than what smashed into the region this weekend.
Throughout the day, people kept one eye on the
forecast and another on the sky, which began to darken again
in the west by 5 p.m. At the command post, a television that
had broadcast the Boston Red Sox game was fixed on The Weather
Channel later in the day.
Rain came again in the
evening. A rescue was under way at 9:45 p.m. in nearby
Lincoln, where the rising New Haven River threatened residents
of a house that became cut off from the road, said Chris
Herrick of Vermont Emergency Management. The new round of
storms slowed efforts to recover from the first batch, Herrick
said.
"It makes it a little harder to assess damage,"
he said, "when damage continues to occur."
