BARRE CITY — Richard Corey finally got the foot-deep pile of mud cleared out of the basement of his Vine Street home last week.
After volunteers made quick work of the mud and drove away, Corey sat on his front steps and prepared to leave for the house where he and his wife have been staying since flood waters reached their home last month. Soon they’ll be looking for another house to buy or rent. They don’t intend to return to Vine Street.
“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to live here again,” Corey said.
His building has flooded five times since 2002. Given the likelihood that this won’t be the last time, Corey said he thinks the city should buy out homeowners on that end of Vine Street.
“Just tear them down, level the lots off and don’t let anybody rebuild here,” he said.
As of Aug. 12, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency data, 765 people who use the ZIP code covering Barre City, Barre Town and portions of Berlin and Plainfield had applied for aid through the agency’s Individuals and Households Program. That appears to confirm that the area suffered more residential damage from July’s catastrophic flooding than any other in the state.
Now, over a month later, Barre City finds itself switching gears from recovery to rebuilding. Last week, during a City Council meeting, officials discussed the road ahead and acknowledged the many unanswered questions before them, particularly given the amount of damaged housing in the city’s north end.
“I think in 10 years, Barre City’s going to look a lot different in one end of the city,” said Janet Shatney, who serves as the city’s planning director, zoning administrator and interim assessor. “We’ve got to rally together and figure out what is it that we want our little city to look like?”
City Manager Nicholas Storellicastro said Barre had come a long way in its recovery and cleanup. This week, the last rounds of debris pickup should be done. All debris from commercial properties has been cleared. A section of Main Street was recently repaved.
Barre Memorial Auditorium, which at one point housed the city’s emergency operations for flood recovery, is now much quieter than it was a month ago. Shortly after the floods, it hosted emergency Red Cross and animal shelters, multiple state agencies, food and supplies distribution, numerous volunteer teams and a temporary headquarters for the city’s police department before it could move back to its own building.
Now, only FEMA and one volunteer disaster relief team remain.
“I’m not dismissing the people who still need a lot of help to recover,” Storellicastro said. “But we are sort of making the simultaneous flip to rebuilding, as well.”
The most urgent concern is housing. In an update that Storellicastro gave to the council last week, he said 110 properties had been significantly damaged by flooding, primarily in the north end. But “significant damage” is a FEMA term and doesn’t account for all damage. FEMA data shows that about 600 total reports of damage were made in the city.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mayor Jake Hemmerick said the most pressing concern over the next few months, before cold weather sets in, is how to get people rehoused.
“My priority would be to get units back online as fast as possible or to create units as fast as possible,” Hemmerick said.
Hemmerick says he’s realistic about how long it would take to build new housing. One low-barrier solution to adding units would be to find existing buildings that could be converted, such as commercial space with vacant upper floors.
He said he’s also heard some discussion about modular or manufactured homes and thinks there could be room for a modular site somewhere downtown on one of the underused city-owned parking lots.
The immediate push to scale up housing wouldn’t just help displaced residents. Hemmerick made the point that it could also help the city’s bottom line.
“Unless we’re focused on building in Barre City and growing the grand list and keeping population and keeping housing units online, we’re going to have to make really hard decisions as a City Council that may have a seven-digit loss in our revenues for our $13 million budget,” Hemmerick said.
Those housing concerns existed before the recent flooding, but Hemmerick said July’s flooding put more urgency behind them.
“Politically hard things to do are easy to put off when there’s no emergency,” he said. “But when there’s an emergency, you start to find — I’ve been finding people are more willing to be creative, to work together and do things that may not be the easy button.”
In the longer term, Hemmerick said, he hopes the city can rely on experts such as river scientists and engineers to “bring good data to community members to make decisions about what Barre is going to look like in the future.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Barre has confronted such a challenge.
After Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin issued a broad challenge for the state to “build back stronger than Irene found us.” Eventually, the state launched the Vermont Economic Resiliency Initiative, or VERI, a program of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development.
In 2015, the project issued a 728-page report with “policy changes and projects to minimize the economic impact of future floods,” according to the report’s summary. It included specific recommendations for five communities, including Barre City and Barre Town.
Portions of downtown Barre had flooded in 2011. The VERI report pressed the community to address Gunners Brook, which had been extensively walled. It also suggested the city remove debris collection points and buy out properties that had been subjected to repeated flooding.
In July 2015, portions of the city flooded again, and in the aftermath Shumlin and then-Mayor Thomas Lauzon pointed to the report’s recommendations, which they said would have made a difference.
“Implementing the recommendations could give water, mud and debris more space to spill, reducing the impacts on homes and businesses,” Shumlin was quoted as saying in a September 2015 version of the VERI report.
In August 2017, Barre City completed work along Brook Street, where three homes and a bridge had been removed along Gunners Brook. The area was also leveled to become a floodplain featuring concrete piles to collect debris, according to a 2017 Associated Press report.
At last week’s Barre City Council meeting, Shatney, the planning director, invoked the VERI report as having potential lessons that the city could use moving forward.
Hemmerick said in an interview that he thinks some buyouts will be easier than others. For properties immediately adjacent to a river or a landslide, those buyouts could be easy decisions. But in other places, such as the bulk of the city’s north end, there is critical infrastructure — state highways, railbeds and utilities — that could make it difficult.
“This is going to take some creativity,” Shatney told the City Council last week. “A lot of public interaction. People need to come to meetings. They have to be willing to listen as well as speak. I think the next couple years is going to be a very interesting time for all of us.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the flooding that occurred in Barre in 2011.
