Risk Is Growing For A Second Vermont Flood In A Week

Areas in green are under a flood watch this weekend.

Gosh, Wednesday was a gorgous day!

Wall-to-wall sunshine, light winds and pleasantly mild afternoon temperatures drew a lot of people outdoors. I hope you enjoyed it, as things are going downhill.

The big weather news is there seems to be a growing risk of renewed flooding in Vermont and surrounding areas, though questions remain about how serious this might get. More on that in a second.

A warm front was coming at us this Thursday morning, but it will get temporarily get hung up over the Green Mountains today. That means it will be warm-ish west of the Greens today with highs closing in on 60 degrees, while many areas east of the Greens won't even make it to 50 degrees.

Only scattered light showers will accompany this warm front, so don't worry about any flooding today Winds will get blustery today and tonight, with winds gusting past 40 mph in spots, especially in the Champlain Valley. (The wind went from calm to gusts estimated close to 30 mph in the hour ending at around 6:15 a.m. at my house in St. Albans, Vermont.

Then the flood threat grows on Friday and Friday night. That storm system we have been talking about will move northeastward along the western slopes of the Appalachians Friday and Saturday, while a cold front sort of sags into northwestern parts of our area from Canada.

The storm will have a rich feed of moisture coming off the Atlantic, and that moisture will interact with that cold front that will be sort of sitting around somewhere over northern New York or perhaps northwestern Vermont.

That means a good slug of rain falling on a wet landscape and rivers still running high from Monday's flooding. At least initially, the flood threat looks best in northern Vermont, rather than southern Vermont Friday night, though the threat is there aross the entire region.

Flood watches are up from Friday evening through Sunday morning for the entire region.

There's a lot of question marks about Saturday. At this point, it looks like dry air will wrap into the storm Saturday over New York State, so only scattered showers are expected there.

East of this area, more wet air will be streaming up from the south, and showers and thunderstorms will develop. Now, that's bad, because downpours associated with thunderstorms would cause flash flooding and worsen the general flooding.

Nobody is sure if Saturday's storms will get going somewhere in Vermont, or further east in New Hampshire or Maine. (There's flood watches over in New Hampshire and western Maine, too.)

One example of the flood threat in Vermont. After some flooding
on the Passumpsic River in the Northeast Kingdom Monday,
high water is forecast to be possibly even worse this weekend. 

North central and the Northeast Kingdom has the most snow left to melt. If the expected slow-moving thunderstorms target that area, the flooding could get pretty serious.

Already, forecasts for the Passumpsic River in the Northeast Kingdom call for a moderate flood crest, higher than on Monda. That would flood some neighborhoods in Lyndonville and shut down parts of Route 5 near St. Johnsbury.

Again, nobody knows where these showers thunderstorms will set up and how torrential they will be, so we just have to monitor future forecasts.

In general, minor to moderate flooding is forecast, which is what we had Monday. But as we saw, even moderate flooding causes a lot of trouble.

Damage assessments are still underway. There's a lot of destruction of town roads and bridges. For instance, in Pittsfield, deep in the Green Mountains of central Vermont, damage to roads and bridges might be as much as four times the town's $230,000 annual road budget, NECN reported.

The Otter Creek at Center Rutland actually reached major flood stage on Monday, flooding a few homes in Rutland City and Center Rutland. The state has so far tallied at least $2 million in flood damage from earlier this week.

It's possible that there was enough damage for parts of Vermont to be declared a disaster area. Of course, if flooding develops this weekend, that would increase the damage.

Lake Champlain was just below flood stage today, but those strong south winds will cause some wave splash over and erosion. The steady winds will actually tilt the lake, so it will be higher on the north end. So up by Rousses Point and Alburgh, the lake might reach flood stage of 100 feet today.

The renewed rain this weekend is sure to make the entire lake go over that 100 -foot flood stage

Beyond Saturday, the weather will remain generally unsettled, but at this point it doesn't look like there will be any heavy rain storms between Sunday and the middle of next week. Just the usual April showers.