It’s hard to find something that rivals the majesty of Vermont’s foliage season, but the very elevated Auclair/Brown home in Moretown Village has been attracting more attention than the leaves this year.
The house, built in 1835, is currently undergoing work to move it (literally) up out of the flood plain. That work has the house elevated on cribbing while the original basement has been removed and filled in. New concrete forms will support a new basement that is at grade level and will provide parking for two cars and other non-essential household items.
The house itself will be lowered back onto the new foundation with the entrance accessible via inside and outside steps and a lift. Beki Auclair and Howland Brown purchased the historic village home in 1995 and moved in in 1996.
Their home flooded, as did many in the village, during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
FIVE FEET OF WATER
“We had almost 5 feet of water on our first floor. The basement was filled and basically all the contents of the first floor were ruined,” Beki Auclair explained.
“We cleaned up and didn’t do really any kind of mitigation because we foolishly thought it was a fluke. There hadn’t been any real flooding since 1927 and we figured it was a 100-year flood that just happened to hit in our lifetime and that it was going to be okay,” she recalled.
But it wasn’t okay -- at least not for the Auclair/Brown family.
Between Tropical Storm Irene and 2024 there have been multiple flood warnings but none resulted in catastrophic damage like Irene, until 2023. In July 2023 Moretown (and Waterbury and Montpelier and beyond) flooded very badly. It happened again in December 2023 and twice in July 2024.
‘HAPPENING EVERY YEAR
“The 100-year floods are happening every year. Since Irene, when it rains hard, even if there’s not a flood warning, it is stressful. And when there is a flood warning we move everything to the second floor and I’m not sure people can tell from the road, but our second floor is really small,” Auclair said.
During Irene they had two young children and were unprepared when the firefighters came to their door to evacuate them. Along with many of their neighbors, they had to flee.
“We had to run, you know, just grab our kids and run,” she said.
“After July and December and July, I told my husband, I can’t do this anymore. We really love living here in Moretown and we looked around here and other parts of Vermont to see if we could find a house but everything we came across either needed significant repairs or was also at flood risk or was very, very expensive,” she said.
So, they opted to work on making their home more resilient. Howland Brown works for Birdseye Builders, and they were able to have the site work done by people they know and trust. Auclair said the house-lifting company was amazing to work with and SD Ireland, on site now pouring the forms and new foundation has been great to work with.
EVERY FIFTH CAR
And the S.D. Ireland folks report that every fifth car to pass through the village slows down or stops to take a look at their house. The house as it is currently elevated is about 30 inches higher than it will be when it is placed back on the new foundation. Auclair said the illusion of height is a bit of an optical illusion.
Lifting the house and removing non-essential functions from the new grade-level foundation is part of a FEMA standard they need to meet to get a FEMA mitigation waiver. That waiver means the house is no longer in the flood plain and no longer needs flood insurance.
The couple qualified for and received FEMA assistance after Tropical Storm Irene and that required that they begin carrying flood insurance after that help. The insurance, Auclair said, is expensive and does not cover much.
When the work on their home got underway this summer, the couple and their now 21-year-old daughter were fortunate enough to find an apartment to rent in Moretown Village a couple doors down from their home which allows them to take care of their flock of chickens (which enjoyed their meals courtesy of the fermented byproducts of Auclair’s company Vermont Fermentation Adventures) and keep a close eye on the project.
If all goes well, they will be back in their house by January. The dry weather this summer and fall helped move the project along.
NO FEMA AID
The Auclair/Brown family are funding this work themselves. There has been no FEMA or other aid available. At one point there was the possibility of some state funds that the town of Moretown had received to help homeowners mitigate flooding impacts, but the state clawed back those funds after the town submitted a grant for them.
“We were waiting and waiting and waiting to hear back and then were told that the state took back the $700,000 that Moretown had been allocated for flood mitigation.
Standing in Moretown village with Auclair on a cold and blustery Tuesday morning this week with the chickens clucking in the background against the noise of construction, it was hard to ignore the fact that the interview was taking place in the middle of the village that has seen such extensive flooding, including Auclair’s business location, the post office, dozens of homes, the school, one of the churches, the town offices, etc.
Repeated flooding, Auclair said, means that people are going to have to do more than shovel out their houses and replace appliances and furniture.
