This commentary is by Maeve McBride of Jericho, former director of 350Vermont, a fluvial geomorphologist, grief activist, and mother of two.
The July floods wiped out the beaver dam just down the road from our home. This was one of many impacts that my boys and I witnessed biking around our town on that first day after the storm. “Don’t worry,” I told them, “the beavers will be back in no time to rebuild.”
Those busy beavers are born with an innate desire to stop flowing water. In fact, I remember a video of a super-cute but wholly ineffective baby beaver who was desperately trying to plug up a hole in its parents’ dam by pulling out sticks from another part of the dam. Solving one problem, creating another.
In the next days, we attempted to be helpful, busy beavers. We mucked out a garage in Richmond. We schlepped up soggy carpeting from a ground-floor apartment in Cambridge. And just like beavers responding to a leaky dam, people, towns and the state sprung into action, making emergency repairs to infrastructure deemed essential: roads, bridges, rail lines.
Like many, I was brought back to memories of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. Many quick fixes to infrastructure happened in the days and weeks following that devastating tropical storm. Some months after Irene, I had the opportunity to join a team of professionals, led by VTrans and tasked with evaluating emergency repairs along Vermont rivers.
For one day in the Mad River Valley, I was the substitute river advocate, the fluvial geomorphologist du jour. I brought a required expertise to ensure that the team would make decisions while keeping the interests of river health and river dynamics in mind.
Fluvial geomorphologists are to rivers as maybe psychologists are to brains. We have a pretty good idea of how they work and might have some helpful insight about how they behave in certain conditions. Still, rivers and brains are complex systems, moderately predictable at best.
The day started in Moretown, and we proceeded south along Route 100, stopping at various emergency repair sites to inspect them. Essentially, if the repairs had been poorly done, then this team had the power to order repairs to the repairs.
We made our way to the Granville Notch, where the road had been reduced to one lane and temporary stoplights were allowing alternating, one-way traffic. We marveled at the change in character of the small, seemingly innocuous, stream in this very narrow gap between Warren and Granville. We imagined how it must have raged in a mighty torrent to wipe out hundreds of feet of that road.
I was not surprised: steep slopes, heavy sediment load, and a narrow valley, all make perfect conditions for a highly dynamic fluvial system. You could think of that little stream as bipolar — often calm, sometimes manic.
I had an out-of-the-box suggestion for the group. Could we just keep this section of the road at one lane, permanently? I can’t remember if they chuckled or just brushed that hare-brained suggestion aside as unrealistic. Two lanes were reconstructed, and not long after, another flood washed out portions of that same section of road. I don’t know how this spot fared in the July floods, but my hunch is that it won’t be long before it’s back to one lane again.
If this summer of intense weather — drought, wildfire smoke, floods, and then more floods — tells us anything, it’s that it’s time to get reoriented.
Several weeks after the flood, I was driving through Cambridge again. Much of the initial debris had been cleared. Things were looking more “normal,” but then I saw the wrecked foundation of a house along the Lamoille River, and I teared up a bit.
But my heart skipped a beat when I drove across the river. My emotions quickly shifted from grief to shock. The river was still muddy and high. Not flood-stage high, but what us river people call bankfull. High enough to carve banks, to move debris, to redistribute sediment — still dysregulated.
I went back to one of my textbooks, to ensure that my memory was not off, and there I confirmed: “Large changes in the magnitude-frequency characteristics of floods, and therefore the level of fluvial activity, can be produced by modest changes in climate, of only one to two degrees in mean annual temperature …”
Stable, meandering rivers might become schizophrenic, braided rivers or rapidly spiraling, incised rivers. Global temperatures have already surpassed 1 degree Celsius of warming, and there’s little hope of keeping warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement.
My feeling of shock was the understanding that I was witnessing the unraveling of the rivers as we know them. These are your rivers on climate change. They take lives and homes, family photos and that brand-new, yet-to-be insured motorcycle. Irrecoverable losses, and seemingly recoverable ones too — like our roads and bridges.
It might be time to pause, busy beavers. Pause to reconsider what’s smart to rebuild in a very uncertain future. Pause to grieve what we’ve lost and what we still need to give up. Pause to reregulate. Pause and ready ourselves for the hard times ahead, recommitting to be better helpers, grievers, sharers and adapters.
