In Vermont, a Push to Prevent Flooding or Get Out of the Way

That’s a question that a growing number of storm-wracked communities around the Green Mountain State — and across the country, from western North Carolina to Louisiana and the West Coast — are now asking. How to respond to the threat of future flooding has become particularly urgent in Vermont, which has already seen its annual average rainfall increase by 6 inches since the 1960s. This tiny, rural state has a higher share of homes and buildings in vulnerable floodplains than most other states. And its residents face a daunting long-term regional forecast: With climate change continuing to intensify, one recent study forecast that extreme precipitation events will increase by 52 percent across the Northeast by 2100. What’s more, many live on the front lines of a rapidly mounting threat: the distinct havoc wrought by severe downpours in steep terrain. When heavy rain hits the state’s mountain slopes and flows downhill, water has nowhere to go but through narrow river valleys — and the hundreds of settlements clustered close to them.

Lawmakers, planners and town leaders are responding to these threats with a raft of new flood-proofing initiatives. And the state’s grassroots energy, neighborly ethos, and commitment to conserving its open spaces could emerge as unique strengths in helping Vermonters adapt to these rapidly evolving risks.

Last year, Vermont’s legislature took a major step when it passed the Flood Safety Act, which will limit new development in flood-prone river corridors starting in 2028. Another new state-wide program called RIVER (Resilience Initiative for Vermont Empowerment and Recovery) is helping communities identify and develop ambitious risk-reduction projects to pursue with newly available FEMA funding. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Vermont have launched a new effort to map hazards in mountain settings, with the goal of giving local planners the tools to predict and prepare for more frequent torrential downpours and flash flooding events.

“When we have floods in Vermont, the big hazard tends to be erosion,” explains Beverley Wemple, a professor of geosciences and director of the Water Resources Institute at the University of Vermont. Unlike inundation flooding, in which river levels go up and down, fluvial erosion occurs when rivers swollen by rainfall or snowmelt move from side to side. During these high-velocity events, rivers can claw away their banks and even carve new channels. As Thiboumery and his neighbors in Plainfield can attest, that kind of flooding can be particularly destructive.

Vermont’s Washington County, which contains Plainfield and Montpelier, the state capital, ranked third in the nation in total disaster declarations from 2011 to 2023, according to data compiled by the nonprofit Rebuild by Design. Vermont, which is the 49^th most populated state, ranked seventh among all states in the number of disaster declarations in that period: Almost all its disasters were linked with severe storms and flooding.

The floods of July 2023 put Montpelier’s downtown mostly underwater and washed out bridges and businesses in dozens of towns across the state. In the summer of 2024, three flooding events struck half of Vermont’s 14 counties. This one-two punch has opened the eyes of Vermonters to the scale of the threat they face. Even those who didn’t suffer a direct hit experienced knock-on effects: For months, road washouts and damaged bridges lengthened commutes all around the state.

“We’re seeing communities lean into [flood planning] in a way they haven’t before,” says Stephanie Smith, who oversees Vermont Emergency Management’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and other funding programs aimed at boosting flood resilience around the state. “There’s an understanding that this is going to keep happening.”

For two centuries, Vermonters built mills, roads, homes, and other infrastructure near rivers, the better to harness their power for industry and use them for transportation. They straightened and dug out stream channels, built berms around agricultural fields, elevated railroad beds, and armored riverbanks with stone and concrete — all of which contributes to more destructive flooding by hemming in and accelerating rivers’ flow. “Historic settlement patterns have pinched our rivers into these narrow corridors,” Wemple says.

Today, many of the flood risk reduction measures being pursued in Vermont are intended to slow the surge of flood waters and spread and “store” that water across open land, to spare communities and infrastructure downstream. In practice, that means giving land back to the river. And that, in turn, means potentially abandoning entire neighborhoods and swaths of town centers.

Vermont is a small state, home to just 650,000 people. But even so, the scale of required flood-proofing is overwhelming. Take culverts, for example. In 2018, a group called Friends of the Mad River launched a culvert replacement project in the town of Fayston that took four years to complete, drew funding from seven different state and federal sources, and cost half a million dollars. (The project was managed to completion by another group, Friends of the Winooski River.)

By one estimate, nearly 13 percent of the state’s 112,000 culverts need upgrading or replacement. Add in hundreds of bridges that need to be elevated, redesigned, or removed, thousands of homes that need to be bought out and demolished, and thousands of people who will need assistance finding new places to live, and one starts to get a sense of the scope of the challenge.

Last year, Vermont was awarded a record $90 million in hazard mitigation grant funding from FEMA, tied to the 2023 floods. Kevin Geiger, chief planner at the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, is overseeing the RIVER program, which solicits and supports communities’ proposals for accessing that FEMA funding. “Besides the buyouts, river restoration is the next priority on the list,” he says. “Where can we remove a bridge, scoop down a field or parking lot, take out some houses, and basically rebuild the floodplain of yore? Lower it all back down and give the river access to that land.”

Other communities are seeking grants to remove dams, upsize bridges, and create flood chutes that function as alternative channels for floodwaters, to protect mobile home parks and other densely settled areas.

After RIVER released its call for proposals last summer, about $400 million worth of pre-applications, or expressions of interest, poured in from towns around the state, taking some state officials by surprise. But not Geiger, who has been working on flood resilience in Vermont since the 1990s.

“I go around saying it will take $30 billion to fix,” Geiger says. While that $90 million in funding is much more than Vermont has ever seen for such projects, he notes, “it’s less than 4 percent of the money needed.”

Vermont has been focused on boosting flood resilience since 2011, when Tropical Storm Irene — which swept across the Northeast, causing 49 deaths and $13.5 billion in damage — washed out 2,000 of the state’s roads and 300 bridges, resulting in an estimated $730 million in damage. The event triggered the release of $34 million in FEMA hazard mitigation funding.

Some of the money was spent to buy out damaged homes and other properties, then replacing them with open space designed to store water so it doesn’t damage downstream infrastructure. The projects have been successful, but they take several years to complete and require technical expertise, complex planning, and a lot of money.

About 90 percent of towns in Vermont have populations of less than 5,000. Big cities might have dozens of staff members working on climate change resilience, says Katharine Mach, a climate risk expert and visiting professor at the Yale School of the Environment. “But a town of 2,000 often has just one person to do everything. As you go into more rural areas, it becomes a very stark and difficult challenge.”

Another obstacle is the housing crisis — a problem familiar to policymakers in every corner of the U.S., but one that looms particularly large in Vermont, where the lack of affordable housing is often cited as the primary obstacle to attracting young families and workers to the fast-aging state. Buyouts only exacerbate the housing shortage because FEMA forbids any future building on a lot that’s been bought out.

Kevin Geiger, who comanaged the state’s buyout program in the wake of Irene, estimates that there have been about 400 home buyouts since 2011. And more than 300 buyout applications are pending, following the 2023 and 2024 floods. “Since Irene, towns have gotten more comfortable with [them].” But since then, the housing crunch has gotten tighter. “I can buy your house,” he says, “but maybe there’s no house for you to go buy.”

Getting people out of harm’s way will, of course, be one long never-ending problem in Vermont, as it will be in coastal Louisiana, Southern California, and everywhere else climate change threatens human life. But Vermont has an opportunity, Mach notes, to align its flood mitigation strategies with its widely cherished values, including broad public support for preserving open space. In that framing, the state’s steep, forested mountain slopes could be viewed as an asset and a proving ground for innovative, proactive flood management approaches, such as repairing old logging roads and restoring higher elevation wetlands to slow water before it hits streams below.

While lower-elevation inundation zones are generally well mapped, both nationally and in Vermont, the drivers and hazards of erosion flooding further upstream haven’t been studied nearly as much. “That’s the next challenge,” says Wemple, who, with funding from the National Science Foundation, is launching a project — with partners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania — on managing flood risks in mountain settings. The goal is to give planners and communities new tools to forecast upland flooding and to identify solutions, whether nature-based or engineered.

Arion Thiboumery sees the trauma of the 2024 flood as an opportunity to revitalize Plainfield — to address the twin crises of the tightening housing shortage and rising flood vulnerability in one stroke. He is helping lead an effort to expand the village on higher ground that’s already zoned for residential development, adjacent to the downtown core. In February, the town will hold design workshops to hear residents’ ideas and concerns.

Backers of the plan envision selling lots as soon as this summer and moving quickly to take advantage of time-limited disaster recovery funding from FEMA and other federal agencies. As time passes, Thiboumery warns, memories of the recent flood will fade, and with it a sense of urgency. “We can be victims and lay down on the ground and cry about it. Or we can think about what can we do. And the obvious answer in Vermont,” he adds, “is to get out of the way of the river.”