Woodstock, Vt., September 11, 2011 -- Mud, rocks and debris have to be cleared in many rivers and streams throughout Vermont as a result of flooding from tropical storm Irene. FEMA is working to provide assistance to those who were affected by Hurricane Irene. Photo by Angela Drexel
State worries that rivers were damaged by dredging while Act 250 was relaxed
This story by Allison Teague originally appeared in the November/December issue of Vermont Woman and the Nov. 16 edition of commonsnews.org.
Tropical Storm Irene swelled rivers and streams to 100-year, and in some cases, even 500-year, flood levels on Aug. 28. The raging torrents washed out roads and bridges, destroyed homes and left more than a dozen communities in southern and central Vermont stranded by the aftermath.
Thousands of tons of sand, gravel, and rock were washed out of roadbeds and deposited in streams and rivers in the region, altering the shape of these waterways for decades to come.
The state immediately gave towns and villages permission to use the fluvial debris to rebuild access roads. Just as quickly, excavators, backhoes, bulldozers, and huge dump trucks massed around the river and stream beds around Vermont to accomplish that task.
Municipalities began work to “relocate streams to a former location,” “re-establish channel capacity,” “facilitate stream stability,” and “reestablish stream crossings.”
Not long afterward, the Compliance and Enforcement Division of the state Agency of Natural Resources began responding to complaints lodged by residents who were concerned about the environmental impacts of streambed alterations.
Since evidence of dredging and bank “armoring” came to light, environmentalists have decried the permanent damage caused by the excavation of streams and questioned the state’s handling of the emergency.
Act 250 after Irene
River and stream alterations such as armoring (embedding rock in banks) and channelization (digging out stream beds) have been off-limits since 1970 thanks to Act 250, Vermont’s signature environmental protection law that controls land use and development.
Deb Markowitz, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, suspended certain Act 250 rules immediately after Irene.
“Gravel and rock fill for road and infrastructure repair is critical to Vermont’s post-Irene response,” Markowitz said shortly after the cleanup began. “To assure availability of material that has been requested by the state or towns for such repairs, the Natural Resources Board [which enforces Act 250] is temporarily suspending enforcement of extraction limits and trucking, and is allowing closed gravel pits and rock quarries to be reopened on an as-needed basis.”
ANR officials gave towns verbal permits for to dredge streams through the beginning of October. At that time the state began to require written permits for all streambed alteration and gravel removal, according to Compliance and Enforcement Director Gary Kessler. Complaints about unapproved streambed work, he said, will be taken seriously.
“The locations with the most number of complaints will be the first we will look into,” Kessler said.
Grafton reacted swiftly
Grafton was one of the towns in the region that was cut off when the main roads washed out, but it was also one of the best prepared. Town Emergency Management Incident Commander Bill Kearns, a former FEMA attorney and now a Grafton resident, knew what to expect, and he parked machinery at the fire and rescue department, recruited contractors, and then obtained faxed approval from ANR’s District 2 Environmental Commission Coordinator, April Hensel, to “open any pit you want” to fix the roads the day after Irene hit.
As a result, three days later, residents and homeowners were able to get in and out of Grafton on roads that were “not up to standard,” but nonetheless allowed traffic.
For weeks, in an attempt to repair river channels and protect property farther downriver in Saxtons River, backhoes, bulldozers, and excavators lumbered into the river and began moving rocks and sediment, berming some and carting the rest away to “be stockpiled in the Rockingham highway yards,” according to R. J. Furgat, the operator/foreman of Buck Adams Trucking and Excavating LLC in Westminster, contracted by the town of Rockingham to deal with the emergency.
One of the results of severe flooding is likely to be that “the river bed was raised,” in some places several feet by gravel, rock and sediment, according to Furgat. “We’ve been hired to remove the excess gravel and clear the debris, as well as [re-]make channels and pools for the river to flow more like what it used to do,” Furgat said.
A mile or so downstream along Route 121, another contractor, Bazin Brothers Trucking, also of Westminster, spent several weeks clearing debris and berming the banks of the river with gravel from the riverbed, then leveling it. Bazin Brothers subsequently set up a gravel grading and crushing operation on the north side of the river in the flood plain where, before the flood, a farmer’s cattle had grazed.
Of time and the river
Time shows its effects on rivers and streams slowly, so human memories are short when it comes to events that result in flooding and damage.
Floods leave rich soil that is good for crops, and farmers along the Connecticut River have tilled floodplains for several centuries. Towns have also allowed building near rivers, despite historic flooding. But with the damage costs rising into the billions of dollars following Tropical Storm Irene, the state is encouraging towns to rethink planning and implement greater controls on development in floodplains.
“People don’t like to change,” Markowitz said. “It’s not going to be easy.”
A third-generation Vermonter, Caitlin Noel, executive director of the Friends of the Mad River, pointed out that rivers “operate on an entirely different time scale than humans.”
Noel, who holds a bachelor of science in environmental science from the University of Vermont, said that rivers have been “moving and changing since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago, meandering across floodplains, and moving sediment as our mountains continue to wear down over the course of geologic time.”
“The issue of dredging and stream alteration has been a very polarizing one,” Noel continued. “However, I believe that people on both sides of the issue want the same thing: to protect our communities from harm. The two camps simply disagree about the best way to do that.”
Environmentalists want to keep dredging to a minimum because the scientific evidence shows that removing silt and gravel is detrimental to river ecosystems.
“Scientists have documented what happens when you channelize, dredge, widen, and armor rivers over the years in places around the world, and the science is clear,” she said: Dredging damages waterbodies.
Many states limit the amount of gravel that can be removed from a stream, and regulate channel management, she said.
“[ANR] takes a watershed approach, understanding that river systems are interconnected, and the actions that are taken in one place can reach and affect the conditions of the river in upstream and downstream locations,” Noel said.
But Irene may have changed all that, Noel noted, and by the time ANR responded with guidelines, “The damage had already been done.”
Fish populations and their riverine habitat were impacted significantly.
In a study of selected streams affected by Irene, Rich Kirn, a fisheries biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, noted a loss of 33 percent to 58 percent of wild trout populations following the storm, compared with surveys before the storm.
“Young fish were particularly affected [0 percent to 37 percent of pre-flood levels], while older trout fared better [41 percent to 64 percent of pre-flood levels],” Kim said.
Kirn also noted that the impact of in-stream flood recovery activities “such as channelization, excessive stream bed excavation, and large-scale natural wood removal greatly reduces the quality and diversity of aquatic habitats necessary to sustain fish and other aquatic populations.”
He added that is difficult to say whether it would take longer for a river to recover from catastrophic changes from a natural disaster of the magnitude of Tropical Storm Irene, or from the extensive damage that is being caused by what he called “misguided human intervention.”
“It is my understanding that Vermont’s rivers are still in a period of adjustment due to historic channel straightening that occurred in the 1800s,” he said.
What happens next time?
Climate scientists, environmentalists, Gov. Peter Shumlin and Markowitz — agree that there will be a next time.
Noel wants to know what will be different “next time.”
One of the biggest problems was an inadequate number of technical staff from ANR who were available to respond to the emergency – there were only four river specialists available to help towns and villages dealing with cleanup following Irene, according to Justin Johnson, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation.
Markowitz said that all the state’s agencies involved in the Irene disaster — from the Agency of Transportation, to the Agency of Natural Resources, to the Department of Environmental Conservation — are “stepping back to say, in the case of another event like this one, what are the lessons learned?”
“We want to be sure we have the capacity to meet the need” should a similar event recur, Markowitz added. “In this particular case, we had over 2,000 streams and impacted areas that [still] need to be addressed.”
Markowitz said the agency’s emergency response was “not a realistic way to deal with it (Irene).”
In an ANR study from 1999, “Options for State Flood Control Policies and a Flood Control Program,” the agency stated that “flood recovery operations have historically and frequently addressed only the symptoms of a greater problem rather than focusing on identification of the cause and determining how to facilitate improved system stability.”
“This is somewhat a funding-driven shortcoming, but a problem of institutional focus as well,” the report warned.
In August, Shumlin called for the formation of an international task force “to study issues related to flooding on Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River,” following spring flooding that destroyed homes and property all around Lake Champlain, in New York, Quebec, and Vermont.
Markowitz noted that “because of that experience, we had already made it a priority to have a more proactive approach” to mitigating and controlling flooding in state.
However, the biologic impacts on habitat following Irene have not yet been fully assessed, as the state continues to grapple with the damage to the infrastructure of roads, highways, and bridges, and biological and habitat assessments of the damage to private and municipal property continue.
With Vermonters coming to grips with a changing climate that includes increased precipitation, Shumlin urges residents to start to “change how we do things, and think about where we build our communities and developments.”
“Our city and town planning must reflect what we know about where floods occur, and not build there,” he said.
Those who fail to heed current warnings, Markowitz said, might find themselves disqualified from receiving FEMA assistance should a similar event occur. “We know it’s not if, but when,” she said.
Editor’s note: Anne Galloway contributed to this report.
Correction: We originally stated that Act 250 rules regarding stream management were lifted in the immediate aftermath of Irene. This was incorrect. Act 250 requirements were lifted for the reopening of gravel pits, according to Ron Shems, chair of the Natural Resources Board.
