Vermont Heat Wave Was State's Worst Weather Disaster Since Irene

 A week of sustained heat scorched this hosta in my St. Albans,
Vermont yard. The hosta was adequately watered throughout, but
the heat curled and dried out some of the leaves.

Last week's heat wave killed four Vermonters, making it the worst weather disaster to strike the state since the catastrophic floods with Hurricane Irene in 2011. 

Irene killed six Vermonters. Unlike Irene, the heat wave last week caused damage in the state somewhere in the range between minimal and non-existent.

Thus, there was little media attention to this latest weather disaster.

Unlike in Irene, viewers of national news had no word of our heat disaster - no footage of people mourning the loss of some of our iconic covered bridges, no images of plucky residents of devastated, isolated small towns reaching out to help their neighbors, no FEMA, no disaster declaratioms.

Though, as an aside if the current dry conditions continue to intensify in Vermont, we might find ourselves declared under an agricultural disaster zone, as drought could eventually ruin crops. But that's not an immediate threat.

Heat waves, as I have frequently noted, are not photogenic, like catastrophic floods are. So they don't garner as much media attention as more dramatic events would, like inundation, tornadoes and hurricanes.

Hot spells are in general the deadliest type weather event. On average, more people die from heat annually than from floods, tornadoes and hurricanes.  But we here in Vermont are not used to seeing heat deaths during the summer. We usually don't have enough hot weather to kill people.

However, heat kills in the Green Mountain State, and this July certainly wasn't the first time and won't be the last.   Two people in Brattleboro died of heat-related problems during a brief but intense June, 2017 heat wave. 

A Vermont State Police trooper died of heat stroke during a 2015 training exercise. And in 2013, a logger died of heat stroke while working during a record hot day. 

I'd been afraid that the heat wave would prove fatal in Vermont. As I've noted previously, at least 74 people died in Quebec from the early July heat. 

It's certainly possible more heat waves will strike the Northeast, including Vermont this summer. (Early next week looks like it might be brutal.) So, just like when winter weather turns especially harsh, we have to watch out for each other when it gets very hot.

Or at least try. My 89-year-old mother largely ignored my increasingly strident edicts demanding she get to the cool basement with her cat. My sister ended up dragging mom, kicking and screaming to air conditioned buildings for heat breaks.

Like most of us, I whined about how how it was and lamented the heat damage to my hostas, as the torrid weather kept grinding on. I was pretty much literally sweating the small stuff.

But the Vermont deaths in early July prove that any kind of weather can be deadly, if there's too much of it.

Five Years Ago Today, Irene Caused Epic Vermont Disaster

People try to save produce from a Waitsfield, Vermont
farm stand during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. 

Five years ago today,  Hurricane Irene, weakening to a tropical storm, unleashed almost unprecedented torrents of rain on upstate New York and Vermont, leading to one of the worst weather disasters in the region's history.

The storm killed six Vermonters, left 531 miles of state roadways impassable and closed no fewer than 34 state highway bridges.

The Winooski River blasted through the Vermont State Office complex in Waterbury, where much of the state's government functions happen.

There's a good series of articles and photos on the Vermont Disaster Recovery site you should take a look at.

While there are still signs of damage, it's hard to see vestiges of the destruction now that five years have gone by.  Homes have been repaired, or if they were destroyed, torn down.

Some places near rivers will never hold homes or businesses again: They've been turned into parkland. Why rebuild in a place that might flood again?

 Certain repairs were incredibly fast. Vast stretches of Route 4, the main east-west highway through central Vermont, washed away.

Yet, I remember just two and a half weeks after the disaster, Rachel Maddow declared Route 4 in Mendon that day's nominee for  "Best New Thing In The World" 

What had been a gaping canyon left by Irene was now a functioning two lane road again.

You can still sense a certain unease. Will there be another Irene? Has the weather gone out of whack? Has climate change brought us a new normal? After all, we've had lots of weirdness in the weather since Irene.

We've had other floods, most notably in central Vermont in 2013. We just had by far the warmest winter on record earlier this year. What's with this long, long, long spell of dry weather that's been going on for months now?

Whether or not any of this has anything to do with global warming, Irene certainly got Vermonters talking about climate change.

New England has had other tropical systems as strong as Irene, so the storm itself was not unprecedented.

But 2011 was wet, wet, wet, even before Irene. That's what made the flooding so destructive. The ground couldn't take much more water as Irene's downpours arrived. The rain just rushed off Vermont's hills and mountains, creating the state's worst disaster since 1927

That year -- 2011 -- had already brought disastrous weather to Vermont. Several flash floods caused extensive damage during the spring of 2011, especially in the Lamoille River Valley and around Barre, Vermont.

Lake Champlain rose to a record flood, causing additional multi millions of dollars in flood damage along its shores.

Ironically, on the fifth anniversary of Irene, Lake Champlain seems to be closing in on a record low level, due the winter that wasn't earlier this year, and consistently dry, hot, sunny weather since early spring.

Just recently, a Congressional Budget Office report warned that damage from severe weather in future decades is expected to get worse and worse as climate changes. That echoes many other scientific and government reports.

It does so even as we watch other parts of the nation get wrecked in big weather disasters, like what we saw in Louisiana this month.

"When it comes to addressing climate change, the most expensive option is to nothing at all.....We have a financial and moral obligation to combat climate change. We must aggressively transition away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy," Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said recently.

Vermont tried to rebuild  - to the extent the federal government allowed -- with bigger culverts, stronger bridges, better protections against floods, since the assumption from Gov. Peter Shumlin's administration is storms would just keep getting worse in Vermont and everywhere else from climate change.

The state legislature approved measures that would get towns to build larger culverts or, even better, open bottom structures that would allow road beds overhead to better withstand future forceful floods like the one Irene unleashed.

The other shoe will drop at some point, and Vermont will face another disaster. We are resilient and have proven ourselves more than capable of recovering.

But still, every threatening storm does raise that Irene fear just a tiny bit, doesn't it?

Today Is The Second Annivesary Of Vermont's Irene Disaster

Before and after Irene.

Hurricane Irene drowning a farm stand in Waitsfield,
Vermont as people try to save some of the produce.  

That's now partly a definition of Vermont today, on this second anniversary of the storm that rattled our sense of security as it flushed away parts of our historic, loved towns and villages.

Before Irene, floods happened, but we managed. After Irene, floods happen, we believe they're getting worse and we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the entire shoe store to drop.

Before Irene, Vermont was full of charming villages in beautiful river valleys. After Irene, Vermont is full of charming villages in beautiful river valleys that are maybe one step away from utter destruction.

Before Irene, Vermonters trusted the culverts and bridges to hold during our summer downpours. After Irene, we peer through the rain, half expected the culverts to wash away and the bridges to collapse.

When Irene hit, we Vermonters pulled together, and did a remarkable job of helping the newly homeless, slogging out their muddy basements, finding them new places to live. When stores, devastated by the flood, finally reopened, we flocked in, throwing some of our money their way, because they needed it.

Town and state road crews did an incredibly job repairing and replacing the roads wiped out by Irene. Flood wrecked towns put on a brave and beautiful face for the annual fall foliage season that arrived bright and on schedule weeks after Irene.

A lot of vehicles in Vermont still have a front licence plate that reads "I Am Vermont Strong," a testament to our abiity to recover from such a disaster.

The Winooski River swallows trees in Winooski
Vermont amid Hurricane Irene flooding.  

With a few exceptions, Vermont has physically recovered from Irene. The landscape is still dotted with abandoned, wrecked homes, tilting over demolished foundations, or their walls are blown apart by the force of the water on August 28. 2011.

But mostly, the view in Vermont today is one of late summer bliss. Swimmers  are escaping one of the last humid spells of the summer by languishing in the shady, sandy edges of calm swimming holes along rivers that raged two years ago.

The green hills are as beautiful as always, rendered soft and tinted with blue in the muggy summer haze. A few trees with orange leaves stand out, sentinels of the oncoming autumn.

It's relaxing, that's for sure. But we're not that relaxed. The emotional toll of Irene lingers whether we're conscious of it or not.

For many of us, when a summer downpour arrives,  the thought crosses our minds: Will this be another disaster? Sometimes, the fleeting thought is well founded. Repeatedly, in May, June and July, vicious thunderstorms and blinding downpours blasted Vermont.

The now familiar sight of roads washing away, basements quickly submerging and torrents sweeping down hills all became reality again early this summer, further shaking our sense of security already undermined by the tsunami that was Irene.

Ask anybody and they say the weather has changed in Vermont. For centuries, we lived with the cliche, "If you don't like the weather in Vermont, wait a minute, it will change." It's always been unpredictable here.

In one of the most photographed, most iconic
images of Hurricane Irene in Vermont, this
old house in Pittsfield lies in ruins. 

But the unpredictability once had some sort of rhythm, which is gone now. The temperature spikes into the 80s in March, only to slump to freezing in June. The thunderstorms seem more menacing, more powerful. Is that our imagination, or are they really worse?

It rains for days on end, then it's dry for weeks and the forests catch fire. Then the humidity becomes so maddening you want to flee to comparatively Arctic Houston.  The winter snowstorms have become newly epic, then the piles of white wilt in a springlike thaw a few days later.

The state's politicians and land use regulators, from Gov. Peter Shumlin on down, say we have to keep rebuilding smarter after Irene. It makes sense. The goal is to build stronger bridges, wider, taller culverts. Convince people to abandon their riverbank lives and literally head for the hills.

We try planting different crops, ones that grow in new, warmer planting zones. Vegetable farmers abandon the rich soil of the flood plains, because the spring floods that once brought nutrients to the soil before the season's planting now come all summer, drowning the tomatoes, eggplant and cucumber the farmers want us to munch on.

Vermont is adapting to what is widely believed to be a new, warmer, weirder climate. That's happening all over the world. The job is necessary and unsettling. Especially since we don't know if our adapting is good enough.

In fact, it's sometimes not. When the floods came back to Vermont this summer, some of the Irene repairs held. But water cascaded through areas that even Irene spared. It's a constant battle to rethink our adaptation.

I have no sure idea if Irene was related to global warming. But the storm came in the kind of warmer, wetter summer they say is going to be routine here.

Whether or not Irene had anything to do with a new climate dawning on Vermont and the rest of the world, it was our signal. The familiar, usually friendly enough climate that we'd gotten used to for generations is gone.

Mother Nature has turned abusive, and there's no sign she's going to get any nicer anytime soon.








 remarkably kept the culverts pretty much unclogged, the roads patched, the