Dave Colton surveyed the wreckage of the town three generations of his family had called home on the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, 2011.
Saturday night into Sunday, flooding caused by Tropical Storm Irene had torn through Pittsfield, a village of about 500 people just north of Killington.
That morning dawned as a “beautiful bluebird day,” brightly revealing the carnage.
The Tweed River had dislodged or destroyed several houses, and Pittsfield had turned into an archipelago, with great gulfs dividing each section of town into its own island. Washouts and damage to the two bridges along Route 100, the main road that connects Pittsfield to the rest of the state, separated the north, south and central parts of the village, and cut the village off from the rest of the world.
”We were stuck on both ends of town, and we couldn’t get in or out,” Colton said.
The storm had taken a huge toll on Vermont. More than 2,400 roads, 800 homes and businesses, 300 bridges (including historic covered bridges) and a half-dozen railroad lines were destroyed or damaged, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.
In Pittsfield, Central Vermont Public Service, the electric utility that served the town, estimated it would take more than a month to power up the town once more, and several weeks at least to repair the roads so its trucks could get in.
But Dave Colton and his brother, Chuck Colton, and their father, Mel Colton, had other ideas.
“We just knew we had to do something,” Dave said. “It was sad, but we had to buckle down and stick together and had a job to do.”
And they wasted no time about it. At 8 o’clock that Monday morning, Dave jumped on his bulldozer and Mel, who was then 83, climbed into a backhoe, equipment that was part of their family business, then called Mel Colton Excavators.
They set to work filling in the trenches that the flooding had clawed into the state highway. The earth was wet and sandy, and sank into the ground as soon as they packed it in. But they kept at it.
They worked late into the night to fill in the cavern separating the south and central part of town, so that by the next morning the formerly stranded residents of nearly 40 homes across the gulf could come into town for assistance and emergency workers could reach the village.
By the end of the third day, another crew working on the north end had connected the entire community. Over the next two weeks, the Coltons worked from dawn to dusk, sometimes as late as midnight, with the road illuminated only by the glow of their headlights, to render Route 100 roughly passable and reopen Pittsfield to the world.
Photos courtesy Barb Wood
“For my age, the days are longer than they used to be,” Mel said in the 2012 documentary “Flood Bound.”
“They didn’t used to be anywhere near long enough, and now, I say, ‘If the day started in the morning and ended at noon it would be plenty long, for me.’ But I still love what we are doing, and we did all we could.”
Dave said it never occurred to the trio that they should wait for instructions from higher-ups before they started working to repair their community. Why? “Because we’re Vermonters. That’s why!”
The Coltons continued working to repair Pittsfield for the next two years, side by side, just as they had for the nearly 30 years before the storm.
Mel first plopped Dave in a backhoe and set him to digging when Dave was just 5 years old. Dave says he learned everything he knows from his father, including a tireless work ethic and dedication to the community they called home.
Mel worked up until he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015, retiring just six weeks before his death. Dave proudly remembers him commanding that backhoe, a pillar of strength in a community that had been dealt a tough blow.
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Correction: The name of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been corrected.
