LINCOLN, Vt. — The capital of Vermont — the state that often tops those “best states to move to avoid climate change” lists — was, until Tuesday afternoon, mostly underwater.
Swollen by record-breaking rainfall, the Winooski River claimed nearly the entire downtown area of Montpelier late Monday. Swift-water rescue teams helped people escape from the upper floors of apartments not far from the gold-domed State Capitol. Even the governor was forced to hike from his house on a snowmobile trail to reach an emergency response center in time to lead a news conference on the still unfolding disaster. By Wednesday morning, residents and business owners were stepping through the mud caking their front steps and basements to assess how much they had lost.
Vermonters have seen floods before. But amid the scenes of destruction, there was a sense that some threshold had been crossed.
The receding water sloshing in our streets was ferried by storm tracks from fast-warming seas 1,000 miles south. The storm dumped four to nine inches of rain on towns up and down the Green Mountain State, where the ground was already saturated. With nowhere else to go, it filled creeks sluicing off the mountains and then rivers like the Winooski, the Mad and the Black and on into Montpelier and towns like Ludlow, Richmond and Weston, where water submerged much of the fire station.
As the world heats up, our benchmarks are becoming increasingly useless — as useless as the notion that there are any places to move to avoid climate change. Americans suffer from a longstanding delusion, a hangover of sorts from the Manifest Destiny era, that there will always be some corner of our vast country to escape to. Its 21st-century form is the notion that one can just pick up stakes and move somewhere else to get away from all this quickening climatic chaos.
Twelve straight days of 110-degree temperatures in Phoenix, after weeks of a punishing heat dome, have pressed down on Texas. Wildfire smoke from Canada obscured the Chicago skyline, just weeks after triggering a spike in asthma hospital admissions in New York and Washington, D.C. On Sunday, eight inches of rain fell in a few hours near West Point, N.Y. — a “once in a thousand year” event — even as an entirely different band of violent storms buried the Oklahoma City area in floodwaters, too. The same day, ocean temperatures off the Florida coast passed the 90-degree mark. Even here in Vermont, norms are being transgressed. In late June we hit an all-time high for air pollution concentrations.
When I moved to my gravelly, wooded strip of land an hour south of Montpelier about a decade ago, I didn’t harbor many illusions that I could insulate my family from climate chaos. Thanks to my chosen profession of climate journalism, I was familiar enough with facts, such as: For each degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere holds 7 percent more water vapor, driving the extreme precipitation events in New England that have increased by 55 percent since 1958, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
But there are facts, and then there is lying awake at night counting how many sheets of plywood are in the barn in case the stream jumps the bank and heads for the basement. There is pulling ticks — which recently expanded their empire into my high, cold piece of Vermont, courtesy of warming winters — off my daughters almost weekly. There is making a spare bed for one’s parents to get them out of their creekside cabin.
Our infrastructure wasn’t built for these extremes, for this pace of change. Neither were our prevailing risk models. Just two weeks ago, researchers from the First Street Foundation warned in a new study that the database that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to estimate the risk of extreme rainfall events is being outpaced by climate change and is in urgent need of updating. Americans can now expect to experience “once in a hundred year” rain events at 20-year intervals, on average. And the trend won’t stop there: That interval will keep shrinking, thanks to unchecked fossil fuel burning.
Monday’s flooding destroyed a temporary bridge across the White River, which had been erected to take traffic while workers were building a $24 million replacement bridge. They were set to start pouring concrete this week, as reported by our local nonprofit news outlet, VTDigger. “That was the plan,” said one of the crew’s foremen, “but Mother Nature changed it.”
The climate is jumping the banks, blowing past the guardrails. Another recent study found that in the United States, flood risk isn’t being accurately incorporated into property values anywhere — and that overpricing has created a $200 billion bubble in the country’s housing market. Not surprisingly, Florida is a big piece of that story. Somewhat more surprisingly, Vermont is an overvaluation hot spot too, according to models of future scenarios of extreme flooding under climate change. This makes the state’s financial architecture and heavy dependence on property taxes for revenue as vulnerable to future climate risk as its physical infrastructure.
Late Monday, a friend in my town texted an update on the river level, along with the observation that “it’s the oncoming darkness that makes it more worrisome.”
I knew what she meant. It’s the uncertainty that gets you, that ties that knot of discomfort in your chest. It’s a sensation familiar to anyone who has stared down raging wildfires in California or Gulf Coast hurricanes and now to Vermonters, too. And for me, it’s laced with something new: the near certainty that this will happen again. And again.
As the Winooski River retreated on Wednesday, it revealed the only climate refuge that remains: neighbors aiding neighbors. “The sense I have gotten,” a friend who lives in Montpelier texted me, “is an overwhelming willingness of people to volunteer, to help in any way they can.”
But the vulnerability of this “brave little state,” as its native son President Calvin Coolidge once called it, was laid bare all the same. As the floodwaters recede, the notion that any place could be somehow insulated from extreme weather and the ravages of a warming climate should be swept away, too, for good.
