Vermont recovering after major flash flooding disaster
Director Eric Forand of the Vermont Emergency Management updates the latest conditions in the state's recovery efforts after sustaining severe damage from a major flash flooding event on July 11.
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00:00Can you update us on what the latest conditions are like?
00:04As your picture of Stowe shows, we're in a kind of a blue weather situation right now. We are
00:09working to get our roads back up and running. We're working to ensure that individuals have
00:13the housing that they need, working to ensure that municipalities have the resources they need
00:18to get their roads and bridges back up and running. But we do also have a careful eye
00:23towards tonight where there's a potential for some more storms to blow in, and we have some
00:28severely saturated ground, so the flash flood threshold is much lower, so we are watching that
00:34with a very careful eye. Yeah, which pretty much answers this question, but let's expand a little
00:38bit more on flooding being a bigger risk now. You mentioned it's the saturation just from last week,
00:43but also I'm sure folks still recovering from last year's big event. Yeah, and last year we had an
00:50initial event around July 7th with a landslide, and then we just had rain almost every other day
00:57until mid-August. So as the ground gets more water, it can't hold water, and the water then
01:02becomes a flash flood problem. Or then it will congregate and run down through the valleys and
01:07make the larger Stem Rivers flood, which is what we saw in some of the cities last year. So the
01:13event on the 10th and 11th this year was mostly flash flooding because the ground was saturated,
01:18it couldn't absorb the water, and it ran down sides of roads and washed out culverts and bridges.
01:24So that's the most of the issues that we saw. There was some main stem
01:28flooding, but for the most part they got very bankful but did not cross over, so we did dodge
01:34that one. Eric Foren, Vermont Emergency Management Director, thank you so much for bringing that
01:38information and bringing us an update, and I hope Vermont stays in the clear here as we head into
01:43the rest of our summer. Thank you very much.