by Timothy McQuiston, Vermont Business Magazine On Aug. 28, 2011, the covered bridge in Lower Bartonsville village washed down the Williams River during Tropical Storm Irene. A video showing the 1871 bridge disappearing into the river included gasps from onlookers. It was essentially intact as it appeared to be sucked into the river. You can find the video on YouTube.
The bridge was rebuilt and reopened in January 2013 as a replica of the original. The engineering of the new span received design awards.
The covered bridge in Quechee, next to the Simon Pearce store and restaurant, also was severely damaged and needed to be rebuilt following Irene.
It seems impossible to imagine, when you look at where that bridge is situated above the Ottauquechee River, that any amount of water could reach the span. But it did. And then it did again in July 2023.
But the damage to the Quechee bridge this time was less severe, and it was soon repaired.
As Vermont Transportation Secretary Joe Flynn said last month, the key is “resiliency.”
What Irene taught Vermont was that the new world of climate change is requiring much more resilient infrastructure. What the floods in July taught was that downtowns must also become resilient.
Resiliency is expensive. Flynn said every storm is different. He noted that where the Irene-damaged infrastructure was rebuilt to resilient standards, the damage was much less severe, if at all, in July.
Green Mountain Power is also seeking resiliency. The utility’s Zero Outages filing with regulators addresses the first phase of an initiative that calls for an investment of up to $280 million over the next two years — $250 million for undergrounding and storm hardening lines and $30 million for energy storage.
In the past 12 months alone, major storms required GMP to spend more than $45 million on repairs — the most ever recorded in a single year. Since 2014, major storms caused $115 million in damage across GMP’s service area, 60% of that in the last five years and 40% in the last two. Indeed, the three worst storms in GMP history, in terms of outages, happened in just the last 12 months, as the snow has become heavy and dense.
Green Mountain has already installed 50 miles of underground lines in rural residential areas. Those customers did not experience any major disruption during the recent major storms. In addition, where spacer cable has been installed, trees from outside the rights-of-way fell on, but did not damage, the lines.
Using spacer cables is akin to putting a roof on a bridge to protect the roadbed.
This doesn’t mean the lines will hold in every future heavy snowstorm — which is also part of the strategy — but when service is disrupted, the system has enough redundancy to switch to local sources.
Using backup batteries and home batteries, which GMP is helping to subsidize, and even using electric vehicles, are all part of the Zero Outages plan.
This initiative leverages circuit-level resiliency data, combined with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention community vulnerability data, topography and other metrics to determine the right resiliency approaches for each of GMP’s 300 circuits. This ensures that all customers experience zero outages, whether in a remote area or in a densely developed downtown.
As Flynn has said, every storm is different. The 1927 and August 2011 floods were deluges that caused enormous damage to infrastructure. The spring 2011 rain and snow melt brought Lake Champlain into waterfront homes. The July flooding was the result of ceaseless rain. The 1991 flooding of downtown Montpelier was caused by an ice jam, with a similar impact on the state capital during the July event.
We build on floodplains because that was where the historic transportation and industry was located, and it’s just about the only flat land in Vermont.
Many flood-control dams were built after 1927. After Irene, much of the roads and bridges were hardened. What July 2023 has shown us is that downtowns and residential areas need a different strategy. We have to find a place for the water to go when the inevitable storms arrive.
Green Mountain Power has a plan for the electric grid. It’s expensive, but with a clear return on investment. An even more expensive and complicated plan will be needed for the downtowns. As of now, no one knows exactly what that will look like.
In years to come, one Vermonter might ask another, What did you do after the flood? To which the answer might be, Which one?
