BARRE CITY — Andrea Young works in emergency management. She’s familiar with the wide range of emotions that disaster survivors go through during a crisis — the initial rush to get things done and the slow, seeping terror as the reality of what’s happening sinks in.
But it’s different, she said, when you’re living through it.
Young was in Louisiana the week that widespread flooding hit Vermont last summer, giving a talk about the effects of climate change on emergency management. At the same time, her neighbors were texting her, warning her “it doesn’t look good,” she said.
When she returned a few days after the initial deluge, she found that no water had gotten into her house on Currier Street in Barre City. Then, she went into the backyard and saw that the bank of the stream behind her home had moved. A couple hours later, she said, it appeared that the land had moved even farther.
She called the fire department, and officials soon came to look. They told her that her home was being “red-tagged,” meaning that she would have to immediately leave her house. She did a “mad dash” to pack up her things, grabbed her cats Bean and BB, and moved into a camper in her driveway.
That’s when reality truly sank in.
“Now what?” she recalled thinking. “I don’t know what steps are next, and I don’t know how to handle this, and I don’t know what the next action is that I need to take.”
Six months after the July floods caused nearly 80 landslides across Vermont, Young is one of a half-dozen Barre City homeowners who remain caught in the long and arduous process of figuring out what to do with homes that are not themselves damaged, yet are uninhabitable because of the ground around them.
Rep. Jonathan Williams, D-Barre City, has a term for these homes: “cliffhangers.” No other Vermont municipality is home to as many.
“These homeowners are in limbo,” he said, because they don’t qualify for traditional aid programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s compensation for destroyed homes.
“It’s a terrible thing to say,” Barre City Manager Nick Storellicastro said, “but these homeowners might have been more lucky if the slide had given.”
Instead, these homeowners are waiting to see if they could qualify for a state buyout, a process that could take years.
There have already been delays in the months since the landslides. Alexander Raeburn is the owner of a home on Pike Street, where a tension crack in the city-owned railroad bed above his property has put his house at risk.
When he first spoke to VTDigger in mid-December, he said he was expecting to receive a report from a geoengineering firm that day that would confirm the ground behind the house was unstable. Nearly a month later, he’s still waiting for that report.
“I’ve lost faith in the government process as far as being there to help individuals experiencing these challenges,” Raeburn said. “I think there’s a lot of people who care, but there are far too many gaps in the system.”
The cliffhangers, as Williams dubbed them, have put the city in an unusual position as well. Storellicastro told legislators in the Senate Committee on Finance on Jan. 9 that the city had received 40 buyout requests from both landslide- and flood-affected property owners.
The state Hazard Mitigation Grant Program would pay the local share of the cost, about 25% of the total, while the federal government covers the rest. But Barre would have to front that money, which Storellicastro said could create a major cash flow issue for the city.
In the case of Raeburn’s property, Storellicastro also is worried about what happens if the city buys the property. It could be on the hook to build a retaining wall that could cost up to $1 million.
“I’d really like to know that before we would do a buyout there,” he said.
Young said she has not heard anything about a buyout for her property since the landslide. She said she’s offered to have an assessment done but has not heard back from city officials.
She’s worked hard to buoy her spirits, but “the future is very bleak.”
“I’ve worked hard to build my credit score and buy a house by myself, and I’m proud of that,” she said. “And there’s a chance I might lose that.”
Between a rock and a hard place
Ben DeJong has been busy lately. The head of the Vermont Geological Survey and the two others on his team traveled throughout Vermont in the months after the flooding to evaluate roughly 80 landslides, all brought on by the 6 to 9 inches of rain the state experienced in July 2023.
Those landslides include eight residential properties that were rated 4 out of 4, meaning that a ground failure that could damage homes was imminent or had already occurred, he said. Five of those properties were in Barre, while the three others were in Ripton, Randolph and Hartford.
Barre was once the center of a large granite industry, and remnants of that industry can still be found in the ground beneath the city, DeJong said.
Both Pike and Courier streets experienced landslides within human-built structures. At Pike Street, the landslide, a “textbook” tension crack, occurred in a raised railway bed, DeJong said. At Courier Street, the culprit appears to be industrial granite waste that a previous homeowner used to level the ground around the home.
In any “normal scenario,” that rock would have withstood geological pressures, he said, making it fine to build on. “We’re just now learning that they’re not as stable as we thought when you put an extreme amount of precipitation in,” he said.
DeJong wrote a brief report about both situations last summer, recommending that Vermont Emergency Management consider buying out the properties. He was not surprised to hear that Geotech, the firm working on the Pike Street report, was taking longer.
“We were operating in a sort of a fast-paced mode trying to get to multiple locations in any given day,” he said. “That’s more like hazard identification than it is a full geotechnical report.”
Meanwhile, the cliffhangers have navigated the process to get individual assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which could include money for renting other places to live, repairs to damaged homes and in rare cases money for fully destroyed homes.
Raeburn said that FEMA sent officials to his property for three different inspections. On the third inspection, the inspector “stepped on the lawn and said, ‘it feels safe.’ I didn’t realize that’s how simple it was to become a landslide specialist,” he said.
Young said she spent countless hours on the phone coordinating paperwork, each time with a different FEMA employee. There were times when she would get a message from the agency saying that she was missing a document, only to call and have the person tell her they could see it in their system. Another time the person on the phone said her document was illegible, but when Young looked at the upload, it looked “crystal clear.”
Young received rental assistance money from FEMA about five months after she left her home. She’s since moved from the camper into an apartment in Winooski but still has to pay her mortgage and other home expenses.
She also received some repair assistance money from FEMA, but she hasn’t felt comfortable using it because she’s not sure how to spend it, or if she might owe FEMA money if the home gets bought by the city.
“The area of failure is the entire length of my house,” she said. “You can always do something, but why would I spend $700,000 (on a retaining wall) on my $250,000 house?”
Raeburn said FEMA also determined his home was in the “repair” category, which required him to pay tens of thousands of additional dollars compared with the “replacement” category, in which homeowners are eligible for higher payouts.
Angelique Smythe, a spokesperson for FEMA, said via email that when homes have been condemned, FEMA “works with the applicants to get appropriate documentation submitted to ensure they are receiving the maximum assistance possible.”
“We look at these on a case-by-case basis,” she wrote.
Another FEMA spokesperson, Joshua Marshall, declined to comment on the specifics of Raeburn’s case, saying only that it “will be escalated up.” He advised Raeburn to call the FEMA help line to check the status of his appeal.
It’s unclear how much FEMA aid has gone out to landslide survivors in Vermont. The agency reported on its website that it’s given out $25 million in individual assistance to individuals and households, but it doesn’t break down the data by type of damage.
Vermont’s response on shaky ground
DeJong is concerned about how prepared the state is for another series of landslides. The Agency of Natural Resources, which houses his team, recently asked lawmakers to consider creating an interagency task force to help respond to future natural disasters.
“A really large-magnitude event like this requires a response statewide, and a fast and effective response across the entire state is really tough when you’re only a survey of three people,” he said.
Local communities, lawmakers and state officials have spent the past six months discussing how to mitigate flooding and prevent damage in the next rain event. But DeJong said that mitigating landslide risk involves unique challenges.
While FEMA maintains a record of properties in flood zones, there’s no comparable statewide database of properties that may be at risk of landslides. There’s also no clear way for homeowners to tell if a slope near their home is actually a landslide risk. Some steep slopes actually hold together well if they are made of bedrock, he said, while you should be wary of any slope made of “unconsolidated materials,” or loosely arranged sediment.
He recommended homeowners hire experts to look at their properties. If possible, they could try to keep stabilizing tree roots intact or divert runoff away from the worst parts of the slope.
Raeburn said one FEMA official told him that the agency was seeing an uptick across the country in situations similar to his, where poorly maintained former industrial sites cause havoc for communities.
Raeburn said he feels neglected, left behind by a government and media narrative that emphasizes stories of recovery and rebuilding rather than the Vermonters who are still struggling and failing to make progress.
“This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever been through,” he said. “It nearly ruined me. It nearly broke me. And if it weren’t for the support of my friends and family, I’m not sure where I’d be or how I’d be right now.”
