Vermont After the 2024 Flood (a Northeast Kingdom Reflection)
The immediate losses after the rains of July 10–11 were huge and heartbreaking. Two men died, one a 33-year-old dad, one aged 73. I didn’t know them, but in the way of close communities, I knew the families.
And villages were physically torn: Peacham, Vermont, and Barnet, Vermont, took the hardest blows this time, with roads ripped away by the torrents. The small-town swimming beach on Harvey’s Lake, where for several years I teamed up to manage teen employees, lost its huge parking lot and the function of the beach, as six inches of the lake tore away down a nearby channel, breaching the water-level control dam and gathering force. As the water pounded into the Stevens River, it flooded the glassworks building where I’d lived for three years with my kids; it swept mud into the ground floor of the historic mill I’d helped restore with grant funding; it finally reached Barnet village itself, near the Connecticut River, and in its rush through the town center, it tore out roads and a highway bridge.
Friends lost homes. More friends are still struggling to clean and dry out basements before mold can attack their residences. Vehicles went — including the entire front lot of a used-car dealer in Lyndonville.
Here we are, more than two weeks later. Most of the roads in the region are now…
