As infrastructure damage comes into focus, Vermont releases nearly $30 million in highway aid

It hasn’t been easy getting around Barnet since severe flooding hit the rural Caledonia town this week. “I think we have, for example, one road that’s not damaged,” Benjamin Gates, the co-chairman and road commissioner, said Friday.

Plainfield has several roads and “a number of bridges that are completely removed,” said Clerk and Treasurer Bram Towbin. Driving from one end of town to the other normally takes two minutes, Towbin said. Now, it takes about 45 minutes, he said.

Meanwhile, in Moretown, the Mad River caused a bridge on Route 100B to collapse and caused extensive road damage, selectboard Chairman Tom Martin said Thursday. Flooding a year ago caused about $1.5 million in road damage, Martin said: “And we’ll certainly eclipse that this year.”

As floodwaters continued to recede Friday, state and local officials in northern and central Vermont got a clearer picture of the impact on infrastructure — which was, in some areas, worse than the damage caused by last July’s historic flooding .

As of Friday, 18 state-owned roads were still closed — down from 54 Thursday, Vermont Transportation Secretary Joe Flynn said at a news conference Friday. Those 18 road closures include eight state-owned bridges, he said.

But those numbers don’t include miles and miles of city and private roads, many of which suffered significant damage — especially if they were unpaved.

Martin, the Selectman of Moretown, estimated on Thursday that hundreds of residents in his town were stuck in their homes after dirt roads were washed away.

In Barton, Clerk Kristin Atwood said road damage was worse than seen in the 2023 floods.

“The dirt roads in the city — there’s a lot missing and it’s taking longer to fix because we need more rock to fill them in,” Atwood said. “These gaping wounds in the roads are 8, 10 feet deep in places and that takes a lot of material.”

In Hinesburg, where some residents with rain gauges recorded ten inches of rain, flooding washed out roads to about 20 homes, according to City Manager Todd Odit.

“A lot of the gravel roads in our hill section have seen pretty massive devastation, total loss of road,” Odit said. “And we have a lot of people on private roads who have completely lost their way.”

It was, he said, “the worst damage I’ve ever seen in Hinesburg.”

The Vermont Agency of Transportation is releasing $29.5 million in aid to the city’s highways early, Flynn announced Friday. The money, allocated in Vermont’s annual transportation budget, was originally supposed to be paid out over six months, but will now be paid out by early August, Flynn said. The state will begin paying the first amount of money — $14 million — by early next week.

Eight sections of rail, served by Amtrak and freight lines, have also been closed since Friday. Amtrak’s Vermonter passenger train, which runs between St. Albans and Washington, D.C., are not running, Flynn said Friday.

A segment of rail line between Middlebury and Burlington is also closed, affecting the Ethan Allen Express between Burlington and New York City. However, passengers can take a connecting bus between Burlington and Middlebury, and “Vermont Rail Systems is reporting that this will be a pretty quick fix,” Flynn said.

Most of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail is still open. Sections between Swanton and Cambridge Junction, St. Johnsbury to Danville and Walden Heights to Hardwick Depot are all accessible, Flynn said. But other sections sustained damage, including “a pretty significant spot that was destroyed” in West Danville, he said.

By Friday, power had been restored to nearly all Vermonters affected by the flooding. According to VTOutages and Green Mountain Power, only 14 Green Mountain Power customers in Barnet were still without power due to the impact of flooding as of Friday afternoon.

Those customers were expected to have power restored soon, Green Mountain Power spokeswoman Kristin Carlson said.

“We serve three-quarters of the state of Vermont, which is a very rural service territory, which is remote dirt roads,” Carlson said. “And the vast majority of our customers live in these remote areas, and any outages that were restored today were in those areas that were hard to get access to because of the severe weather and the damage that came from that.”

As of Friday afternoon, 48 households served by Washington Electric Co-op were still without power, according to General Manager Louis Porter.

The co-op expects to restore power to 18 of those households by Friday evening, Porter said, but the remaining customers will likely have to wait until the weekend. The co-op is still working to restore power to hard-hit areas in Plainfield, Fayston and Middlesex, he said.

One area of ​​the state’s infrastructure appears to have fared relatively well. Amid the flooding, Vermont’s dams have so far appeared to be holding strong, Neil Kamman, director of the state’s division of water investments, said in an interview Friday.

“It looks like it’s a much better situation than last year,” Kamman said, referring to the challenges facing Vermont’s dams after last July’s flooding.

The three flood control dams on the Winooski River — Waterbury, Wrightsville and East Barre — all worked well during the rains, Kamman said, and had plenty of water capacity.

Out of an abundance of caution, a state dam engineer, Ben Green, slept in his car at Waterbury Dam Wednesday night so he could release water in an emergency — something he also did during last year’s floods.

That emergency did not happen. Officials were aware of no significant damage to any dams, Kamman said. In fact, initial reports of a dam break at Harvey’s Lake in Barnet were incorrect: The dam had breached but was not damaged, state officials said.

However, as communities uncover and calculate the damage, the bill for infrastructure damage is likely to be high.

“I don’t have a ton of history with estimates in this area,” Bolton City Administrator Brian Roberge said when asked about the cost of city road repairs. “But I would say, you know, it’s going to start with M.”

Emma Cotton and Kristen Fountain contributed reporting.