In the aftermath of the July 10 flooding, Mad River Valley Planning District (MRVPD) staff members reached out to local town officials, offering help cataloguing damage from the flooding.
Accurate documentation of flood damage is critical after extreme weather events if towns and organizations want to recoup FEMA funding.
MRVPD community planner Sam Robinson said that planning district executive director Josh Schwartz reached out to local town clerks on July 11 offering their help cataloguing damage. Waitsfield and Warren had relatively minimal damage while the roads in Fayston sustained significant damage.
Robinson said that Fayston town clerk Patti Lewis got back to them and said that road foreman Stuart Hallstrom and his crew were already at work repairing critical road networks and welcomed help cataloguing the damage. She reported that FEMA personnel were also in The Valley conducting assessments.
Robinson said that he and Schwartz got to work measuring the length, depth and width of road damage, starting on North Fayston Road near Dunbar Hill where the damage was extensive. They also catalogued damage on Sharpshooter Road, Center Fayston Road, Phen Basin, Stagecoach Road, Smith Road, Barton Road, Airport Road, German Flats and Route 17.
“We noticed, halfway through our work, that the FEMA coordinators were also working. We didn’t want to complicate things, so we reached back out to Patti who asked us to keep cataloguing the damage. The information we catalogued will give deference to the FEMA work,” Robinson explained.
He and Schwartz were using a rolling measure and regular tape measures to assess the extent of the damage and then running those measurements through GIS software to calculate the theoretical of road material lost.
Both he and Schwartz said the work was impactful, both in terms of the amount of road and infrastructure damage done, but also because they were assessing damage in and around where peoples’ homes and driveways had been damaged.
“We were there to measure what happened and understand the extent of the damage and at times we were looking at someone’s property while they were inside witnessing us. Sometimes they came out and shared their experiences. We tried to give some kind of guidance to folks without misleading or over promising, such as take a lot of pictures,” Robinson said.
“It was a very powerful experience,” he added.
Schwartz concurred, and said he and Robinson did what they could, sometimes helping move things, sharing information about documentation and sometimes just offering hugs.
