Mad River Valley Rotarians, seeing a need and working with local organizers, put together an effort to help people impacted in floods in several Valley towns over the weekend.
Rotarian Peter Colgan, Fayston, said he was approached by a local contractor who wanted to help and reached out to Rotary, offering to help with a day of service. Colgan sent out an email blast with a Google doc for people to sign up to help and then later, sent out another document Rotary organizing effort.
“I put it out and got some nibbles and then got with Kim Canarecci, a North Fayston neighbor who also wanted to help,” Colgan said.
He and Canarecci and other volunteers gathered at the Fayston town office on Saturday, July 13, and spent the day helping folks at the bottom of North Fayston Road whose driveways were washed away by Shepard Brook and whose yards were damaged and at least one basement was flooded. They did the same on Sunday, deploying additional volunteers to a home on Stagecoach Road in Fayston and to homes in Moretown where people needed help with flood clean up.
“We received a call for help from a homeowner just past the break in Route 100 at the bottom of Ward Hill and we couldn’t get there in a timely manner so we got them connected with Waterbury’s CReW organization,” Colgan said.
CReW, or Community Resilience for the Waterbury Area, was formed in August 2023 after the July 2023 flooding to help the community recover. It is a designated long-term recovery committee that is highly organized in terms of resources and personnel and Colgan realized that there may be a need for something similar in The Valley. After Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, long-term recovery committees were formed in The Valley.
“Contacting CReW Waterbury to help this Duxbury homeowner left me with a decent awareness of what a properly developed long-term recovery effort should look like,” he said.
He pointed out that a fundamental tenet of Rotary is that club members are “People of Action” and said he was glad the Mad River Valley Rotary was able to put volunteers with people who needed help. He also thanked Canarecci, an emergency management professional, for her organizational help and insight as volunteers helped homeowners.
“Overall, I feel like this was a moment for Rotary to stand up and do this for the community,” he added.
Here is a link for those who want to help:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdO2zmZ6Q-Jy-hiPE4AiSTBZ0dE9n7rEU9bgI3g46U9C8W8Hw/viewform
And here is the link for those who need help: (https://forms.gle/Wu4CjUZ7b3rBRtCPA)
