BURLINGTON— By most accounts, Burlington was spared the worst of the flooding that ravaged much of central and southern Vermont. But for people experiencing homelessness, the hours and hours of pouring rain were still arduous.
“Since it started raining, that last storm, I haven’t been able to sleep,” Casey O’Brien, who has been living outdoors, said Tuesday afternoon at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity’s Community Resource Center.
O’Brien, who carried an aluminum baseball bat for protection, said that he had been camping at Oakledge Park when the rain struck. He and some companions stayed under the park’s pavilions to escape the rain, he said, but “we got swarmed. Like we were covered in mosquitoes.”
His tent is still in the park, he said, and he’s not sure whether it survived.
“I had a little bag full of all my little, like, mementos since I was like 10 years old,” he said. “So I’m hoping that that didn’t get out in the water.”
Inside, Brandon, who declined to provide his last name, said he had come to the resource center for information about job training and because they were handing out tents.
Brandon was staying in the woods near the Winooski River. His tent had recently been stolen, he said, so he was spending the night under a tarp, an experience he described as “stressful.”
“I didn’t really sleep much, because I was more worried about the rain falling,” he said.
A woman who gave her name as Stacy said that she had been staying in another tent nearby. When it started raining, she said, her belongings got soaked and she left to find shelter in Burlington.
She was “worried about rain overflowing us, flooding us out, taking us downstream, because we’re so close to the river,” she said.
Paul Dragon, the executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, said that he was not aware of any “major incidents” or “major displacements” in the Burlington area. People seemed to know that heavy rain was on the way, he said.
But the resource center has been busy in the mornings, he said, as people “come there to get dry and to eat and get other resources.”
“I think people are wet and stressed out more than usual,” he said.
