WATERBURY — The art teacher remembers the text messages she got on the Sunday the storm came to town.
The water is rising.
We have to evacuate.
I don’t think we can have school tomorrow.
There was no school ‘tomorrow’ or the rest of that week late in August a decade ago, as MK Monley and thousands of other Waterbury residents confronted the catastrophic flood damage wreaked in town by Tropical Storm Irene.
Waterbury got 8 inches of rain in the storm, causing the Winooski River to gush into nearby streets and, ultimately, damage more than 200 homes and businesses.
Some 1,300 employees were displaced when the state office complex off Main Street was flooded. And about 50 psychiatric patients had to be transferred out of the state hospital there, which would later be shut down.
Thatcher Brook Primary School, where Monley taught art, became the center of Waterbury’s storm response. Evacuated residents slept in the gymnasium. Food was prepared in the cafeteria. Town officials worked from temporary offices in the classrooms.
Monley remembers seeing hundreds of volunteers from across the country taking orders in the school’s parking lot. The Federal Emergency Management Agency worked out of the elementary school, and later at the town’s fire station.
Yet amid all the damage, which the Stowe Reporter estimated in 2011 to be around $10 million, Monley said it was never a question whether locals would help one another.
On Randall Street, which was hit hard by flooding, volunteers grilled food for the neighbors. Local restaurants donated what they could no longer serve.
“Everybody just stepped up,” said Monley, who also was president of the community development organization Revitalizing Waterbury. “And it wasn’t like you were told you had to. You wanted to.”
Whitney Aldrich, whose riverside home on Healy Court flooded with more than 2 feet of water in the storm, agreed.
“I can’t tell you how many friends and coworkers came and worked right alongside me to get our house to a point where we could start drying it out,” she said. “Then, we just moved right on down to our neighbors and helped them do the same thing.”
A town rising
Aldrich is a member of Waterbury Arts, a group that’s creating a mural of a phoenix on Stowe Street to celebrate local resilience 10 years after Irene.
The 22-foot-tall artwork should be completed this month. It was inspired by a paper phoenix sculpture, which Monley helped make, that led the town’s River of Light lantern parade several months after the flood.
“It was just a really great vibe and a remembrance that, hey, we can get through this together,” Aldrich said of the parade. “I kind of wanted to keep that feeling alive.”
The phoenix is an apt symbol for change in her life, too. In 2011, Aldrich was working as a graphic designer at Green Mountain Coffee, but itching to be her own boss instead. Then, the flood destroyed her art-school portfolio at home.
“I didn’t have any better of a reason to start over,” Aldrich said.
About a year later, Aldrich decided to leave her job and buy a frame shop in town from its longtime owner. She would later turn half the shop into a contemporary art gallery — what she calls her “passion project” today.
The barn on Aldrich’s property was destroyed in the flood, but she and her husband decided to rebuild it as a garage with living space above. Their mailman took the roof trusses from the old structure and used them to rebuild the barn on his property.
Many buildings in Waterbury were renovated following Irene. The state office complex was expanded and modernized to the tune of $130 million, and a new $5 million complex was built for the town government, library and historical society.
After the storm, Aldrich had her house elevated through a FEMA pilot program. It’s now built to federal floodplain management guidelines, she said, though she worries it still could be vulnerable to another major flood one day.
“My life changed for the better,” Aldrich said, reflecting on the decade since Irene. “I hope I’m making a more positive impact in my community because of it.”
Riley Robinson contributed reporting.
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