Montpelier is about to receive $11 million from FEMA for damages from the 2023 flood. My! What grand plans I have heard that the city has for the money: a new police (or is it fire?) station. Redoing city hall? Dam removal to allow for a recreational water park? All sorts of fun projects.
Seemingly, nowhere within these plans is the idea that another flood could come and be worse than three years ago. Such thinking seems to have vanished from the consciousness of our elected officials, or those they hire.
Perhaps it would be worth remembering that although the big flood was only three years ago, already our collective climate has actually destabilized a whole bunch more since then. Currently, a record breaking El Niño is forming in the Pacific that could steer more moisture our way later in the summer.
Montpelier has had no disaster level flooding for the past two years, so all is well — right? In fact, we are now considered abnormally dry. It seems we have forgotten how in 2023 we went from drought to deluge in a matter of weeks, in June and July the rains came and the soil got saturated.
Given the downtown disaster, Montpelier still had more than a bit of luck. In the July 2023 flood, the Dog River crested 18 inches below the raised levee of Dog River Road. This embankment protects our sewage treatment plant. If we had a slightly higher flood level, we (like the town of Johnson) would have lost the wastewater plant. Think we have problems now? With nowhere to treat our sewage, we would create a health emergency all down the Winooski. Were this to happen in our immediate future, without FEMA backstop funding, the city would also be bankrupt with a lost $25 million investment.
Yet, nowhere in the expressed city priorities for the $11 million do I see any plans for raising Dog River Road another foot or two to defend from future climate disasters. Raising that road levee was one of the priorities posted on the wall at the last of the community discussions after the flood crisis. Notably, this specifically needed response was dropped from the published priorities of the Recovery and Resilience Commission a year later. Protection of the wastewater treatment plant was assumed to be provided by a separate grant from the state. A grant that was not awarded. And today, with all the grandiose plans to divide up the FEMA money, this rational priority is still missing.
It would be ever so gratifying to see the council and administration plan and respond to probable futures, rather than wished-for futures.
Raising the Dog River Road levee will require some planning and investment, but the sense of realistic protection of our future public health and collective finances would be more than worth it.
Dan Jones lives in Montpelier. He is an activist working for local resilience.
