Updated at 6:11 p.m.
RIPTON — One home was destroyed and about a dozen were evacuated amid a mudslide on Route 125 overnight, according to the Selectboard chair.
Laurie Cox, who is also one of Ripton’s emergency management coordinators, said as of midday on Saturday she was not aware of any injuries that resulted from the home becoming “unmoored.”
She said the mudslide occurred while town fire Chief Chris Pike was talking to the homeowner outside the home at about 2 a.m. on Saturday as emergency crews were going door-to-door to evacuate homes because of the rising Middlebury River.
“And right at that moment, the hillside collapsed, and the house owner’s truck got pushed right into the fire truck, and our fire chief was standing right in between them,” Cox said. “Fortunately, it didn’t quite come to where he would have been squished, really. … I mean it literally could have killed him.”
Cox said the household includes two adults and a young adult. She was not certain whether either of the other two people were inside the house when it was knocked off its foundation.
The family spent the night at an emergency shelter, she said.
Alison Joseph Dickinson, Ripton’s town administrator, said in emails Saturday afternoon that “everyone is safe now” and the other evacuated families had returned to their homes. She conveyed a message from Tim Hanson, the road commissioner and a selectboard member: “We dodged a bullet I think.”
In a subsequent email, Hanson told VTDigger that road repairs were in progress, and that new — and expensive — larger culverts had held up well. But he expressed concern about Sunday’s forecast.
“If we get a good dose of rain tomorrow in a short time we will be in trouble as the soils are saturated,” he wrote. “The rivers have gone down significantly but there is nowhere for the water to go except in the ditches and culverts.”
Drone images showed a section of a hill had been washed out behind the home on Route 125, which was covered in and surrounded by large uprooted trees. Utility crews were at the scene.
The fire department’s truck that the chief had parked near the destroyed home — a small first-response vehicle — had been recently purchased and was heavily damaged, Cox and Dickinson said. Dickinson called it “unusable.”
About 3 to 3.5 inches of rain fell in the Addison County town on Friday night, according to Jessica Storm, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington.
A flood warning related to the Middlebury River, which hugs Route 125, remained in effect on Saturday in the area, Storm said.
Cox said that from what she’s gathered, “there’s really no way that you can put a house back on that piece of land.
“Which just makes it harder,” she said, “because if your house burns down you still have your land, and you have your infrastructure — your driveway, your septic, your well, whatever. But if you lose the piece of property essentially … then you can’t just rebuild when you don’t have the land there anymore.”
She’s lived in Ripton since 1978 and “seen some flooding,” but “every time, it’s a little different, which just makes it harder.
“Apparently … when the fire chief came by to evacuate, they were like, ‘river’s never come up here,’ and that was right when the hillside came down,” she said. “That’s the thing — just when you think you have it all figured out, it can change.”
Shortly before 1 p.m., Green Mountain Power’s outage center was reporting 70% of customers in Ripton — some 280 households — were without electricity. The utility estimated power would be restored by 4 p.m.
Cox said crews from the fire department are going around town to help people pump water out of their basements, given the lack of power.
Route 125 — which runs west to east through Ripton and brings travelers from Route 7 over the Green Mountains to Route 100 — was closed between Middlebury and Ripton on Saturday morning, though Cox said there were other open roads in and out of town.
The Otter Creek, which connects to the Middlebury River in nearby Middlebury, remained in minor flood stage on Saturday, Storm said. She said the Otter Creek is likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, given additional rain in the coming days’ forecast that could increase water flows.
