Editor’s note: This reflection on life in Rochester after Tropical Storm Irene is by Rep. Sandy Haas, P-Rochester.
“It’s official. The emergency is over. We’re now in the recovery phase.” Those were the words of a FEMA representative last Saturday at an early morning town meeting in Pittsfield. After the pledge of allegiance and an opening prayer, town residents heard from several state and federal agencies about the steps ahead in rebuilding their homes and roadways. Document, document, document. Money will come from official sources only with an extensive file of photos, receipts and tedious logs of volunteer services. Bulldozer time is apparently the most valuable in the volunteer-hour hierarchy.
It has now been three weeks since “Tropical Storm Irene” arrived here in ski country. Discovering the Shangri-La we all cherish, Irene lingered here in the narrow valleys along the eastern side of the Long Trail. As much as 11 inches of rain falling in just a few hours has completely changed our lives. Even now, many people still can’t get to their jobs. Where roads are technically open, gaping holes and fragile repairs make travel bumpy and slow. The towns along Route 100 from Waterbury through Waitsfield, Warren, Granville, Hancock, Rochester, Stockbridge, Pittsfield, Killington to Mendon are slowly finding a new pace and character.
On either side of our narrow valley, life appears to proceed undisturbed, as if in a parallel universe. As we venture out of the valley for meetings, doctor’s appointments or critical supplies, we are struck by how ordinary everything seems. For most of Vermont, Irene was just a big rainstorm. For us, it was a deluge of Biblical proportions. On Thursday, a good friend was stopped by a state trooper who cited her for having an expired inspection sticker. When she pointed out that we had been cut off from services by the storm, he brushed her off with “that was two weeks ago.”
For families whose homes collapsed, moved off foundations or floated downstream, life will never go back to what they remember. For others, the tedium of scraping out mud and washing down the mold with bleach will be followed by a slow transition back to the normal pace of life.
But life is different now. We’ve forged new bonds. Neighbors, who once waved and exchanged pleasantries, now hug each other and occasionally share tears of joy that we are all still vertical. Even the most devastating losses left our bodies untouched. Everyone is driven to help out in some way. Some cope with that drive by frantic activity; others search for some critical niche in the ongoing effort to rebuild our communities. New coalitions form. Strong personalities sometimes clash as we work to find the best way to help neighbors in need.
Even the rules of helping are changed. Most of us live in the “mission” mentality of food shelves, churches and government benefit programs that look to poverty as the trigger for assistance. Although we have all been carefully taught the rules of nondiscrimination (against race, religion, age, gender, etc.), FEMA gives us a new rule. Under FEMA there may be no discrimination based on “economic status.” That’s right. Even millionaires have the right to equal treatment and FEMA compensation.
Although this is jarring at first, on reflection, it begins to make sense. In this disaster, we are all victims. Although my personal damage consists of only a fine layer of mud on my basement floor, my life, too, has been upended. I look out on neighbors whose properties are barely salvageable. I experienced the sight of floodwaters rising up to the basketball net of the house next door. I watched other neighbors being evacuated by bucket loader. Although my home is relatively untouched, my immediate world still looks like a war zone. The town’s tennis courts are a crumple of broken green with occasional white stripes. Perhaps hardest to handle has been the survivor’s guilt. Others lost so much, and I’m annoyed that I still can’t buy a newspaper in Rochester. A friend displaced from her home reminds us how lucky she is to be wearing her own underwear. Others did not get their clothes out in time.
The urge to help led me to spearhead a local relief group that could focus funds from friends with a special connection to Rochester. Even giving has its tangles. Our self-selected town relief group is working to find common ground. Those who come from traditional welfare settings are accustomed to means testing for distribution of funds. FEMA guidelines against discrimination based on wealth suggest a different approach in this crisis.
The most difficult lingering community loss is the Route 73 bridge. We have nurses on the west side of the river who work in Randolph. They must keep one vehicle on each side of the river and walk between them to get to work. Daily construction closure of the mountain road between Rochester and Bethel/Randolph hardly fits the schedules of people working second or third shift.
Only a footbridge connects Rochester village with “The Island” on the west (Brandon Gap has been too treacherous for cars with low clearance). Volunteers improvised funky streetlights to make night crossings on the footbridge safer. I connect to “The Island” regularly because our town webmaster lives there and works from his home. www.rochestervermont.org has replaced daily town meetings in Rochester as the source for current information on everything from road conditions to homes needing volunteer assistance in cleanup.
Our cemetery will be repaired. The caskets dislodged by a raging brook have been replaced. Each is now safely installed in a concrete vault and will be reinterred with appropriate ceremony at a later date. We are grateful to the hardworking professionals and volunteers who handled that job with grace and respect.
We are recovering, though much more slowly than was expected by the parallel world. As I write this, Route 4 has just reopened. We can now get to Rutland without a detour through East Middlebury. Construction on a new Route 73 bridge will begin in a few days. Most of all, we count our blessings and enjoy the new friendships we have built.
