A friend left a voicemail on my phone on Thursday, July 11, as the aftermath of the July 10 flash flooding was still becoming apparent.
He said he’d just heard about the flooding on Route 17 and added “My god, Beryl has a long reach.”
He should know. He and his wife are former longtime Duxbury residents who have moved to the island of Carriacou in the Grenadines – the first place that Beryl made landfall on the morning of July 1, flattening the island, its agriculture, 90% of the buildings, the roads, the infrastructure, etc.
File it under the worst case of ‘small-world’ that that same hurricane that decimated Carriacou, took out the electricity in Houston, got itself downgraded to a Tropical Storm and flooded Vermont on the exact same day as last July’s 100-year flood did.
These friends lived on Dowsville Road before they moved away. File that under small world as well since the brook for which the road is named closed two state highways leading into and out of The Valley and left his wife – visiting Vermont and Maine this summer – unable (with the help of Route 17 being closed) to get back into The Valley.
Their house survived the hurricane and our roads are recovering although clean up is a long slog and there may be some FEMA buyouts after this flood. Beryl’s long reach was felt most intensely on the northern end of our watershed and even more intensely on our neighbors to the north. Plainfield, Calais, Lyndonville, Cabot, Johnson and other small Vermont towns suffered catastrophic damage and the tragic loss of life.
As with Tropical Storm Irene (itself spawned from a Caribbean hurricane) the damage from this storm was from micro-bursts falling on the high mountain streams which burst their banks and culverts, taking out everything in their paths.
All too often we are reporting on 100-year floods in Vermont, record tornadoes across the country, unprecedented wildfires and dangerous heat domes.
There really are no coincidences when it comes to climate change. It has a really long reach.
