JOHNSON — Jeane Wolfe and Jerry Williams woke up around 3 a.m. Tuesday at their home in Johnson to what sounded like a waterfall rushing into the basement. “The whole house was just shaking,” Wolfe said. “We knew that we had to leave.”
But they couldn’t leave — at least not right away. Williams ran outside, only to see Wolfe’s car half submerged by water rushing into town from the Lamoille River. He checked the garage — there was his truck, sitting in water up to its windshield.
It took help from a rescue crew for Wolfe and Williams to get out of their Railroad Street home safely, they recalled that afternoon, sitting at a temporary shelter on the town’s Vermont State University campus.
“It was so scary,” Wolfe said, leaning back on a small, teal-green colored cot.
Johnson was among the hardest hit towns in northern Vermont Tuesday as the Lamoille River surpassed its major flood stage, thrusting historic levels of water into towns along Route 15. Much of the east-west highway remained impassable throughout the day.
Johnson officials had to evacuate the town office, where they had set up an emergency operations center, after it started taking on water. By late morning, the town library was surrounded by multiple feet of water, though the levels had subsided by the afternoon.
Jasmine Yuris, the library’s facility manager, was out surveying the flood damage. “That wasn’t there,” she said with a laugh, pointing to a large fuel tank in the parking lot.
Eugene Webber, who also lives on Railroad Street, described a similarly chaotic morning Tuesday. Webber said he was woken up by a loud splash, which he soon discovered was caused by a cooler falling over in his kitchen and landing in floodwater.
Webber said he was worried about an elderly neighbor who has difficulty moving on his own and ultimately needed help getting out of his house. When Webber reached the neighbor on the phone, the man was “floating on a chair,” he said.
Another neighbor helped Webber rescue three cats from a nearby home. “He smashed a window open, and one by one, lifted the cats up out of the water,” Webber recalled.
He added: “Traumatic would be a good way to describe it.”
