This commentary is by Alyssa May, of East Burke. She is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, serving the Orleans Federated Church and volunteering on behalf of Kingdom United Resilience & Recovery Effort.
It feels like a hard time to be hopeful here in the Northeast Kingdom, even for me, and I am in the business of hope. Devastating flooding has ravaged communities a second time this summer. The “1,000-year flood” came 18 days after the second annual “100-year flood”, which arrived on the 2023 flood anniversary.
Right now, we have desperate needs for temporary housing, transportation, food and financial support for those who have just lost so much in these 2024 disasters. That’s on top of the 100 cases our long-term recovery group KURRVE (Kingdom United Resilience & Recovery Effort), is still tracking.
The innate challenges of the Kingdom aren’t new to me. My family’s been here as long as Vermont has been a state. Being overlooked by virtue of our location is not new either. When our family was pronounced the “lost branch” at a reunion years ago, my dad replied “How could we be lost? We have been in the same place for 100 years!”
Many of us in the Kingdom anticipate being overlooked or simply viewed as an idyllic spot for recreation and contemplation. We are, in fact, an idyllic spot. We are also communities of people deserving of the same time, attention and resources as any other part of our Brave Little State.
Real people with real needs live here. While we are deeply grateful to all who’ve donated money and shown up to help, I’m telling the rest of you, we need your help and your money now.
I struggled last summer with labels being touted about the Kingdom. The NEK, we were told, is “resilient” and can “band together.” Yes, these things are absolutely true. I can attest to them. But on the other hand, what choice have we had?
We watched last year as hundreds of people showed up to muck and gut more populated areas, while volunteers, Meghan Wayland of Northeast Kingdom Organizing and Rep. Katherine Sims spent frantic days trying to get Orleans County declared for federal flood aid.
This year, I’ve watched my dedicated, determined colleagues, most of whom are volunteering in addition to their “real jobs,” trek the hundreds of miles of Caledonia, Essex and Orleans counties trying — again — to demonstrate the needs to the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Dedicated or not, these amazing folks are still human, subject to exhaustion and overwhelm in the face of daunting need.
How is this the best use of the limited resources of the limited people here who can help?
We, by virtue of our humanity, deserve not only to survive, but to thrive, as all other people wish to in our beautiful state.
We deserve a state disaster coordinator whose sole job is to manage the increasing disasters in Vermont and make the job of those on the ground easier, not more labor-intensive. We deserve someone whose job it is to contact each of these small, sometimes tiny, towns to ask what they need, rather than wait for us on the ground to “send it up the appropriate chain to the state.”
Try asking a road foreman who has worked for 36 hours straight if he’d like to spend an hour on the phone figuring out who he needs to talk with to “verify” our need. Try asking the town administrator, who worked as a flagger for the week following the second disaster, if he’d like to track down the proper way to execute the memorandum of understanding to be eligible for state reimbursement for trash pickup, so that the remnants of people’s lives can be cleaned up from the side of the road.
We deserve efficient, helpful technology. Vermont 211 and Crisis Cleanup, the data systems most commonly used to identify the needs of our neighbors, don’t “talk” to each other. My colleagues spend hours cleaning up and combing through data from 211 to assess immediate needs. This inability to share data is a solvable problem for someone with the will to do it.
We deserve funding for long-term recovery groups that will still be here, doing the work in three months, in nine months, in the years it will take to truly address the crises of affordable housing, access to resources and transportation in the Kingdom.
Meanwhile, we plead for volunteers to muck and gut wet houses before they are devastated by mold. Yes, recovery is a marathon. But in these first two weeks, it’s also an all-out sprint.
If you come to the NEK for your pleasure, where are you in our time of need?
When I was a hospital chaplain, the nurses’ unofficial rule was “If you can be helpful, great. If you can’t, just get the hell out of the way.” I’m left wondering who, outside of the boundaries of the Kingdom, will be helpful?
I know the people of the NEK can rely on each other in times of desperate need. I am deeply proud and honored to be a part of it. So, I ask, who will stand with us in solidarity?
