When she arrived in Springfield 23 years ago, Kelly Stettner immediately noticed trash submerged in a section of the Black River that winds around a downtown shopping plaza.
“Somebody ought to do something,” she told her husband.
“Well, you’re somebody,” he retorted.
Despite having no background in river health or the sciences — she was degreeless after dropping out of Bennington College 10 years earlier due to an illness — Stettner launched the Black River Action Team to be that somebody. The one-time, 100-foot cleanup of the river back in 2000 soon turned into an annual event, and a river rescuer was born.
After returning to school in 2006 and getting a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, Stettner has since watched the group blossom into a wholesale tidying up of the Black River, a 41-mile-long Connecticut River tributary that stretches from Plymouth through Ludlow and down into Springfield.
But last month’s storm caused the usual Labor Day effort to start early this year, and what typically was a daylong pickup has been stretched out to weeks.
As Vermont’s waterways finally begin to clear up, the story of the Black River is the norm: extended disaster immediately followed by unsafe conditions, a tireless cleaning of hazardous debris and contaminants and, now, a slow but hopeful return to normal.
The 50 stream and river sites that the Black River Action Team routinely collects samples from — some of which Stettner shares with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation — were largely blocked off by contaminated waters, road closures and erosion. Those and other environmental hazards surfaced after Ludlow and nearby areas along the river received some of the highest rainfall totals in the state last month.
But after coordinating with some 300 volunteers on both short- and long-term projects along the river, Stettner was finally able to reach critical points last week. She has also registered Black River Action Team with Crisis Cleanup, a coordination platform that allows the team to see help calls from Vermont 211, another move that accelerated water access.
The river flooded again after more rain hit the state, but nothing near July 10 levels, Stettner said. In the coming weeks, she and her volunteer network, which she said is growing every day, will continue plugging away at the work they started nearly a month ago.
“Now (that) we’re 3+ weeks post-flood, it’s important that we resume our sampling … I am hopeful that bacteria levels at most sites are returning to normal/ambient levels,” Stettner wrote in an email. “Time will tell, but rivers have flooded for millenia and they will continue to do so — it’s up to us to learn to ‘read’ the water and understand how rivers work so we can make the best decisions possible for our own benefit.”
A temporary setback
Vermont watersheds are still reporting above-average currents and phosphorus levels, but nowhere near the levels in the week following the flooding, said Oliver Pierson, lakes and ponds program manager for the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
He acknowledged that both indicators “will definitely be higher” when comparing 2023 to 2022, but would have been “a lot worse” if a decade’s worth of effort hadn’t made watershed infrastructure more resilient to flooding and climate change impacts.
“I think many of our waters, rivers, lakes, etc., are inching along that pathway to recovery,” Pierson said. “So I think folks should anticipate, you know, when they go to their favorite rivers or streams, that the water is going to look more turbid than usual, that water levels will be higher than usual for this time of the year, and folks should be very careful when they go in and see what kind of safeguards and precautions have been made to both test the water and ensure that currents are safe for recreation.”
The Lamoille River dumped 130% and the Missisquoi River dumped half of its 2022 phosphorus levels to Lake Champlain just in the week after the storms, Pierson said.
But he remained hopeful that 2024 phosphorus reduction targets, outlined in the state’s Clean Water Initiatives, will still be met. He considers that “a result of all the great work that’s (been) taking place in the lake watersheds” since 2016.
The explicit outlines for lakes Champlain, Carmi and Memphremagog, along with wastewater reduction efforts across the state, are examples of this, he said, and, combined with post-Irene recovery projects, could mean the state will recover even faster this time around.
“We have to be hopeful that we’ve designed these best management practices in flood-resilient ways and that that effort will bear fruit into the next few years,” he said.
Lake Champlain also set record high water levels last month, sitting an average 3 feet higher than typical July measurements. With more than 10 large rivers draining into it, Lake Champlain‘s watershed is 19 times the size of the 435-square-mile lake. The watershed covers a huge area, almost the same size as the state of Vermont, which results in a lasting elevated waterline for Vermont’s largest body of water. By comparison, the Great Lakes have a watershed to lake ratio of about 9-to-1.
But that is a Champlain-only issue. Pierson said levels and currents among Vermont’s inland lakes and rivers are at or near pre-flood levels, even with ongoing heavy rainfall after the initial storm.
Contaminants and mud irritation also caused waters to appear muddy and turbid in the days after the flooding, and still remain prevalent in waterways across the state.
The 75 or so inland lakes that the state monitors also saw “marked decreases” in clarity in the days after the storm, Pierson said. Visibility in some of Vermont’s clearest lakes dropped between 2 and 6 meters in the aftermath.
Though the situation has improved, that loss of water clarity is a concern, “because not only does that make the lake less aesthetically pleasing for recreation, it has impacts on aquatic plants because there’s not as much light penetrating and can negatively impact aquatic wildlife as well,” he said.
Vermont’s ground and drinking waters have mostly returned to normal levels, too, despite some “tense moments” in the weeks after flooding, Vermont’s Director of Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division Bryan Redmond said.
As testing scrutiny shows, there are currently no large-scale drinking water quality issues outside of a condo association in Londonderry, Redmond said. He also cited elevated groundwater levels as something his department is working to address, urging homeowners to test their own private wells with free testing kits from the state.
“But at the end of the day,” he said, “I think we delivered what we needed to as the water system officials.”
Rebuilding with resilience
Redmond cited several examples of what he dubbed “flood resiliency.” His department’s main goal was to maintain water service as safely as possible during the disaster, and in making repairs, his team went above that by building adaptable systems for the future.
In Woodstock, public works rushed to fix a broken water main at a river crossing — moving so quickly that the workers accidentally used unapproved materials. After rushing to get the pipe back up so people could drink again, the water main was rebuilt under the riverbed weeks after.
Because it lies on the bottom of the river, the pipe had also burst during Irene. So, when it was rebuilt this time, Redmond’s team used directional drilling to put it 15 feet under the riverbed.
“This is a great example of flood resiliency,” he said. “Both instances it blew out, and it will now be protected in the future.”
But as Vermont works to make its infrastructure more resilient, some questions remain difficult to answer.
“What if these storms become more regular? What do you do then? Did this July 10, 2023, storm show us that we need to make our designs even more robust and more resilient?’” Pierson asked.
The key will be to create systems that work well in average conditions, but can also handle large volumes of rain.
“Maybe we should be thinking every 10 to 12 years this type of event (will happen) and use that as guidance to make our best management practices more robust so that we can limit the damage from these huge storm events,” Pierson said.
That work is in the early stages and will be funded through the Clean Water Initiative Program, he said, a program that makes Vermont “really a leader” in climate change and adaptation policy.
But the state could do even more by providing greater incentives to prevent development in river corridors, something that only 10% of municipalities are taking advantage of, according to Brenda Bergman, Director of Freshwater and Science for The Nature Conservancy Vermont.
For Bergman and The Nature Conservancy, the next step is helping install lasting changes to again prevent a worst-case-scenario the next time tumultuous rains hit the Green Mountain State.
“We have short term memories very often because our lives are so busy, and that’s fine. We all need to get on with their lives.” she said. “But can we really apply the lessons from this? Because we do know more floods are coming. … It’s just a plea for all of us to take this seriously so that each time these floods come around, we’re in a better and better position in terms of safety and well-being.”
