Lake Champlain has been flooded for over a month. Vermont has been hit by a series of violent thunderstorms that featured displays of lightning that lasted all night, hail that ranged from pea size to half dollar size to baseball size and rain – lots and lots of rain.
Last week’s torrential downpour on Thursday night wreaked massive havoc on the state causing serious property and road damage. Montpelier’s septic system failed, Barre is devastated as are communities throughout the state from that storm. And that storm came seven days after a brutal downpour that caused $400,000 in damage to Waitsfield’s roads.
And that storm came only weeks after Duxbury was hit by a similar storm that washed out roads and tossed enormous trees around like matchsticks, leaving residents stranded, bridges out, roads gone and $1 million in damages.
Looking beyond Vermont and our Valley, deadly tornadoes raked the South and Midwest last month causing horrible loss of life and billions of dollars in property/infrastructure damage.
This year’s Mississippi River flooding is record breaking. Thousands of acres of farmland are underwater and thousands of people are homeless in states along its path. The Missouri is flooding. Montana and Wyoming are flooded. Manitoba is flooded. The Richilieu River is flooded. There are wildfires burning across Texas.
It is easy to take a head-in-the-sand approach and imagine that all these natural disasters are just a string of bad luck and bad weather. It’s easy to argue that flooding occurs every spring, along with wildfires.
It’s unsettling to take your head out of the sand and ask whether there is any relationship between snowier winters and worse flooding in the spring, or whether climate change might be at work here. The most frequently predicted indicator of climate change is extreme weather events, snowstorms that drop 3 to 4 feet of snow, thunderstorms that rage all night and drop 6 inches of rain, spring flooding in Lake Champlain or along the Mississippi that last for months. And that is scary to contemplate. If all these extreme events are just coincidences, then the state, country and world have had a string of very bad luck. If they are connected, however, the prospects are definitely worse.
{loadnavigation}
