This commentary is by Dan Jones, a resident of Montpelier.
Finding my hometown of Montpelier all over the national news recently was surprising and disconcerting. Overnight, we had gone from being a quaint Victorian-era small city, known for its shopping options and as the smallest state capital, to a symbol of climate crisis.
Walking to the downtown the day after the big storms, I found our flooded Main Street alive with an army of news teams filming people in kayaks, canoes and swift water rescue boats paddling in front of the storefronts. Above, helicopters circled to broadcast live coverage of the flooding.
I discovered that our cute little downtown is perfectly sized to artfully frame disaster at a made-for-TV scale.
For those of us who live here, however, there is a dark and growing realization of what this disaster implies for our collective future. The day after the water receded, the news crews departed as store and home owners, landlords and renters began undertaking the immense task of cleaning up.
Under the banner of “Vermont Strong,” a beautiful army of over 1,900 volunteers marched in to begin the grimy work of mucking out every single one of our downtown businesses and homes.
Our downtown sidewalks were soon piled high with the sodden goods and furnishings that local business folk had once proudly displayed. With grim determination, the shopkeepers, aided by the volunteers, dragged out years of their work to the sidewalk for disposal by the city.
Friends and acquaintances are all looking at these piles of wasted dreams and wondering if FEMA money will come along to help them rebuild. With luck, it will take a minimum of six months or more to repair the buildings. However, arrival of the FEMA money may take a lot longer.
But for now, we no longer have a downtown. The underlying emotion for all of us is sadness. Many merchants, citing the lack of money and the possibility of more flooding, are giving up entirely.
Our local experience is a simple, tragic story of yet another climate-spawned disaster. We share this feeling of tragedy with people in California towns eaten by fire, those who have ridden through hurricanes and tornadoes, and those trapped in the heat domes of the Southwest.
In the past, we would all pull up our socks, pick up the tools and get to work to rebuild. We just assumed that things would go back to normal. But all that has changed; this summer, it seems the long-feared climate tipping point has been reached.
The world’s new climate reality now demands that we all rethink “normal.” Thousand-year-floods are happening every few decades. This is the third time central Vermont has flooded since my wife and I moved here in 2010. The prospects of it flooding again in the near future grow daily as the climate crisis grows.
It is about to get worse, since our scenic New England towns were first built in such valleys because of the availability of water power to run the mills. But as the prospects of more and more floods grows, our Northeast valleys may regularly become a target. As the globally heated air keeps baking the Southwest and Midwest, more and more moisture will be continue to be sucked into the atmosphere, and blown northeast. Hot air holds even more moisture until it runs up against hilly cooler terrain. Then that extra wetness gets dumped here. Vermont could become a temperate rain forest.
Now we need to ask: Is rebuilding the downtown again in our scenic river valley a wise idea? It’s a similar challenge to rebuilding a fire-destroyed town in the West’s drought-ravaged forests.
The climate crisis demands more in our commitments to future development. We have been warned for decades about global warming; we’ve dithered and buried our heads in the sand, or our raincoats, for far too long. The bill for our collective inaction has now come due.
Climatologists tell us that our local floods will happen more frequently as cyclones and hurricanes savage the South and droughts, fires and heat domes continue in the West. The insurance industry understands this. In California and Florida, insurers no longer want to subsidize rebuilding fire, flood, and drought-damaged housing and infrastructure. Here in Vermont, flood insurance is not affordable.
When I say the “bill has come due,” I mean that we can no longer assume random weather events will cause disruptions, but then we will go back to normal. These disruptions will become a repeating fact of our lives, and we need to be prepared to respond and adapt.
Our cities and states need to create and practice robust emergency-response capacity. In Montpelier, we knew for several days that there was going to be a major rain event on top of saturated ground. Yet the state and city did nothing to prepare. Low-lying residents and businesses were not prompted to get their goods and fixtures up out of harm’s way.
In the future, we need to act as if disaster is certain, even if it isn’t. We must also expect a wider range of crises, including heat domes, fires and, yes, more floods.
It is immediately critical to ask whether rebuilding in our flood-prone downtowns, or in any vulnerable landscape, is the right course of action. Everyone gets identified with the sense of community arising from their personal location. It is considered a sign of defeatism to not rebuild because then, the community will be lost.
But if 100-year floods become 10-year events, is it past time to have serious public conversations as to the best application of limited resources? This is a really hard ask because human “normalcy bias” attaches us to the way things are. We have an emotional need for returning to normal, even if that is no longer possible.
Our national public policy is all about returning to normal. Overburdened FEMA might pay to get people back to where things were when disaster struck. They will not pay to improve things to protect against the next disaster.
Our government policy needs revamping, because the dream of returning to “normal” is no longer possible. Sadly, our climate will keep getting more chaotic. National policy must accept the climate crisis and start aiming at helping victims rebuild their lives such that the next crisis will not be as devastating as this one.
Watching the growing piles of our town’s furnishings and fixtures raises a combined feeling of sadness and anger. The climate bill has come due and our future now demands constant payments for the foreseeable future. Let’s be smart about where we put those resources.
