This story by Jason Starr was first published by the Williston Observer on August 10.
Williston emerged from the July 10-11 Vermont floods relatively unscathed compared to the disastrous damage experienced in other parts of the state.
But the town’s firefighters were still essential in the immediate response to the event.
Williston Fire Chief Aaron Collette was deployed to lead an urban search and rescue squad that sped around the state conducting evacuations and rescues of people and pets as the floodwaters crested. He described his experiences in a presentation to the Williston-Richmond Rotary Club last Thursday morning.
For two intense days, the team moved more than a dozen people who were trapped by water to higher ground, evacuated others, conducted a missing person search and lost the service of two swift-water rescue boats — all while going mostly without sleep.
“You can imagine the fatigue level,” Collette said.
The Williston Fire Department is trained as a unit in car crash rescue, rescue from industrial machinery and ice rescue. It has members that have additional training in swift-water rescue and urban search and rescue. Collette showed the Rotarians a photo of a rubble pile at the Vermont National Guard’s headquarters at Camp Johnson in Colchester where firefighters and rescue dogs train in urban search and rescue scenarios.
“I’m not sure that a lot of folks are aware that we have that capability,” he said.
After the flooding of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, the state worked with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to ramp up its swift-water rescue capabilities, Collette said, bringing on rescue boats and conducting training that were essential to operations on July 10-11.
“We were caught unprepared in Irene,” Collette said. “We don’t want to be in that position again.”
By July 7, the National Weather Service was in contact with Vermont first-responders about the foreboding forecast. “‘It looks really bad,’” forecasters warned, according to Collette. “‘This could be worse than Irene.’”
The state deployed 12 swift-water rescue teams and enlisted help from out-of-state crews. By 6 a.m. on July 10, Collette’s team was staged in Manchester. It later went to Londonderry to help people evacuate their homes. There they rescued a driver whose truck was stuck in rising water. They were then deployed to Barre, being rerouted from Route 7 because Otter Creek flooding had made it impassable. They worked in Barre through the overnight hours, catching just two hours of sleep in the Barre Elementary School gym before waking early the morning of July 11 for more rescues.
In Berlin, they rescued a woman who had spent the night on her kitchen counter amid rising water, Collette recalled.
Collette’s team was one of several doing similar first-responder work simultaneously throughout the state. The teams are preparing detailed reports of their experiences for a statewide review, Collette said.
“We want to hear all the stories and hear all the lessons learned to see what we can do better next time,” he said.
He also thanked town officials, some of whom are in the Rotary club, for their continued investment in the Williston Fire Department.
