As Vermont seeks yet another federal damage assessment, state leaders take stock a lot of the practices and strategies we're using from improving stormwater management to working with farmers and foresters on conservation practices we know are the right things.

We know the work we've done on municipal roads in partnership with veterans paid some significant dividends during this storm, and it may be a question as much as anything about the pace of our activity as opposed to the types of projects we're pursuing.

Plus how climate change, location and topography contribute to flood events.

And Vermont's junior senator weighs in on President Biden's candidacy.

That and more ahead on Vermont this week.

From the Vermont Public Studio in Winooski, this is Vermont this week, made possible in part by the lINTILHAC Foundation and Milne Travel.

Here's moderator Mitch Wertlieb.

Thanks for being with us today.

I'm Mitch Wertlieb.

It's Friday, July 19th.

And joining us on the panel today, we have Sarah Mearrhoff, statehouse bureau chief from VTDigger.

Lisa Scagliotti, editor and reporter from the Waterbury Roundabout.

And Abagael Giles, climate environment reporter from Vermont Public.

Thank you all so much for being with us today.

We have a lot to talk about and of course, it is storm related.

It is amazing to me that it's been just about a week since this latest storm hit our region.

And, you know, there were hopes before the storm came that maybe it wouldn't be as bad as last July.

And for some people, maybe it wasn't, but for a lot of others, it really was.

Sarah Meyerhoff, we're looking now at Vermont seeking more federal damage, a declaration, some assessment.

What is it entailing now?

The governor is urging folks to to report to two, one, one and some other things to get this ball rolling.

What's happening?

Yeah, I think really importantly, the message from the administration at this point has been the number one thing that you can do, even if you don't necessarily think you need help, is to report any damage that was done to your house or your property.

That also includes things like cars and whatnot, by the way, from the flood, a 2 to 1 one.

And that is because they are trying to collect as much data as possible in order to basically make the case to the federal government that Vermont was really hard hit by this.

Once again, I think it's really notable that last year by this point, we had an initial disaster declaration from President Biden, but then also following that, a major disaster declaration from President Biden, which unlocked all sorts of federal resources to help respond to the flood, including bringing FEMA to the state.

FEMA's not here yet because we haven't had that declaration yet.

Now, that's curious.

Do we know why?

So what?

When I asked Governor Scott about this earlier this week, he had said that last year the flood was so serious, it was so visceral, invisible, and the damage kind of spoke for itself that all eyes were on Vermont.

That's how he put it.

And the president very quickly expedited a disaster declaration.

And he said, now we're kind of in this place where we're going.

We're experiencing this flood on more of a normal like timeline, basically, which is not immediate, that it's the federal government.

The Congress notoriously move quite slowly.

And now we're kind of seeing that this year, even though I think we can all say from the reporting that we've done for the past week that some communities were just as hard hit.

If not more hard hit this year than last.

Well, one of those communities that was really hard hit was Waterbury.

And Lisa, you know this, you've been reporting on this for the past week.

Give us a general idea of what it's like in your area.

And it's not just Waterbury, it's kind of the surrounding area.

Right.

Right.

And it's interesting, as Sara said, the last year we saw the rivers overflow.

We saw, you know, what, downtown Montpelier was waterlogged.

Bury was underwater.

Waterbury was underwater.

And the rivers really did all this damage.

This storm was different and this storm meant these downpours that came and hit our hillsides.

They hit all the gravel roads that are on the mountainsides.

So the damage is just so much more widespread.

I think in Waterbury, the people right now who are responding are seeing that the people who got flooded last year got flooded this year.

The ones who are in the floodplain near the Winooski River and the Brook said that overflow.

But in addition to that, there's a whole other layer of damage that for the first time, people who live up on high ground have washouts, have water in their homes, have their roads and driveways washed out.

And it's a new experience for them.

So that damage is just very dispersed.

And you drive any road in Waterbury, Duxbury faced it if you can get there.

And, you know, the towns themselves now are dealing with a level of damage that they did not see last year.

Our town alone is right now they've got a running estimate that they think is at least of about $400,000 of just road and culvert and bridge damage in our community alone.

And you were telling me before we went to air that places like Moorestown, where Route 100 has been going through so much trouble, there are places where you literally and it sounds like a joke you can't get there from here.

Oh, 100%.

We've had two or two key state highways in our area just in the last week have been closed because of bridge failures over culverts, Route 100 and Route 100 B.

So access in and out of the Mad River Valley coming from Waterbury has been really difficult.

So 100 meters open two days ago and that was the stretch over in Moorestown where the Dansville Brook literally took out three bridges, two in Duxbury, one in Moore Town, leaving just a dirt road through a neighborhood pony farm road in but in Moore Town became this little highway for the better part of a week.

They finally put in a temporary bridge over that washout, and they opened that the other day.

So people are now able to get back on 100 B.

But people going down Route 100 thinking they're going to go from Waterbury, from the interstate in Waterbury to the Mad River Valley.

Can't get there.

There were some places, though, that were not as bad last week.

Abigail We featured some reporting that you did from Johnson where there were some scary moments.

People were watching whether the river would crest there.

They didn't get quite the damage there.

They did last year, though, right?

Yeah.

Johnson When I spoke to their town manager, he said, you know, we feel like we dodged a bullet this year.

But essentially, you know, walking around town, it was really a matter of people, you know, many of whom are still in flood prone buildings, whether they're homeowners waiting for buyouts from the FEMA process or renters who are kind of still living in flood prone apartments because they can't really afford or find housing elsewhere because of the way the market is right now.

There was a lot of just fatigue and frustration and I think sadness watching the river rise and kind of waiting to see what was going to happen next.

And while folks in Johnson may have escaped the worst of it this time around, as you were saying, these are some folks in Waterbury were experiencing some really bad flooding for the first time.

They didn't have this last year.

So they're experiencing what other folks have gone through now.

Right.

You know, and there are people like Abigail said that there's there's people in Waterbury and our communities nearby that have now heard their third flood in a year.

And so they kind of know the drill.

And a lot of them didn't have a lot of stuff in their basements to be, you know, trash this time around.

But for some people, they, for the first time saw their basements fill up with water and some things get damaged and they're wondering, where do we begin?

It's been really hot and humid this last week.

So just trying to get people's homes, you know, pumped out, dried out.

That's huge because it's really important for them to try to then take the next steps to make sure that mold isn't going to be growing in their homes.

And so there's these steps that the people who've been down this road before are familiar with them and they know it.

But for a lot of people, it's their first time that they're experiencing this.

So the people in our town, there's a long term recovery group in place now because of last year's flood that wasn't in place this time last year.

And they're the ones who are coordinating the volunteers and helping with the response, but they're kind of working with people on a couple levels, like sort of the experienced flood survivors and the first time, you know, flood impacted folks and trying to sort of meet them where they're at in terms of what do they need and what the steps are.

And I'm walking them through how to how to deal with this.

One of the things everybody needs is federal assistance.

And, Sara, like you said, FEMA not here yet.

What is the governor doing at the state level to try to expedite some of this infrastructure to rebuilding?

Some of that looks like cutting red tape for normal like rules and regulations that are in place for rebuilding type efforts.

And the governor did that last year, too, in the wake of last summer's flood.

And so that's something that looks very similar to to last time around to try to handle this within our own borders as much as we can, and essentially make it as easy as possible for people to get work done as quickly as possible.

There are some other things, electric vehicle incentives.

I think he's trying to get, you know, just spur some kind of economic help here.

What is he doing in that in that role?

So for that, that's an existing state program.

There's replace you're right.

There are a couple different program names where folks can get thousands of dollars in incentives to make the switch from a gas or diesel powered vehicle to an electric.

And basically what the governor did this summer, as he did last also, is extend that promotion, I guess you could call it, or, you know, make sure that people whose cars were flooded out that they can qualify for those payments.

So it's up to potentially depending on certain factors.

And if you kind of stack these benefits, you can get up to $11,000.

I think if your car was flooded and you switched to electric and I think 10,000 for a used one.

Yeah.

Yeah, something like that.

Well, anything that can help, it's all patchwork at this point, pretty much.

Abigail One of the biggest concerns to now is after a flood like this, the water quality.

And I know that you've been digging into a lot of the science of this.

What are some of the big concerns?

Yeah, so I think talking with scientists this week at the Lake Champlain Basin program and with the state and with the Nature Conservancy, I think one of the big things to remember is that we have seen floods in our, you know, landscape history in Vermont.

And so these are, you know, our rivers and our aquatic systems are pretty well adapted to recover from big events.

But I think the big concern is that as we see more and more of these kind of really extreme rain events, whether it's because a hurricane that is, you know, stronger and more powerful in part because of human caused climate change, makes its way to New England and meets a very, you know, large, moist mass of air that perhaps is more moist and warmer because of the warming of the northern Atlantic, which is kind of what we saw, you know, with the floods this time around, we're just seeing that these periods of very extreme heavy rainfall are happening more frequently.

They're becoming more extreme and more intense.

And that means that our rivers are becoming like these spigots.

And so all of the things that become swept away by a flood wind up ultimately in places like Lake Champlain in lakes and ponds regionally.

So there's certainly concern there from scientists about what this trend means.

You know, these are systems that are dynamic and can recover from events like this.

But I think the question ultimately that more people are starting to ask is in this sort of much more volatile new reality we're living in are our current protections for water quality standards and regulations robust enough to protect the investments Vermont has already made in trying to reduce pollution in our waterways?

Yeah.

What caused so much of this latest storm was the remnants of Hurricane Beryl, which, as I understand it, was the strongest hurricane this early in a hurricane season ever.

I mean, this is not going to get any better any time soon.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think there's sort of like, you know, complicating factors here.

This event, as both of you have spoken to, is very different, both in how it played out in communities this year and also in terms of the weather.

But, you know, from last year.

But but certainly, you know, we know that on the one hand, Vermont and New England have always been hit by tropical storms and hurricanes.

We kind of shut out over the eastern, you know, the Atlantic seaboard.

But on the flip side, we do see that those storms are becoming more intense in part because of climate change.

And so I think the real question is we've always seen volatile weather here where perhaps just seeing it, the volume turned up.

And I think more and more scient just as more Vermonters are, how do we prepare for for this in the future, for the next the next flooding event?

Lisa, I want to start with you on this next question, but I'm really going to throw it out to everybody here on the panel because it feels like, you know, we had tropical Storm Irene in 2011 and then people thought maybe this is a once in a 100 year type thing.

No, obviously not.

It's ten or so years later, we're dealing with it again.

And now just one year later, what is the feeling among the people you're talking to in Waterbury and the surrounding areas, Lisa, about just the fatigue factor going through this?

Again, some people for the first time, but just the feeling that's out there for folks.

Oh, it's it's raw right now, to be honest, in our community.

And and I see a few things happening.

I see people who have been flooded before, who are frustrated, who are angry and exhausted with this and are reacting in a few different ways.

Some people are deciding they want to sell their homes.

They want to get out.

They don't want to do this anymore.

They've investigated things like raising their home and flood proofing, but they just feel like they're they're done.

They don't want to do this anymore.

This happening too often.

And then there's others who are really starting to say, we need to do something.

You know, it didn't take long.

It was within about 24 to 36 hours where we started seeing messages on Front Porch Forum.

And I started getting some letters into the roundabout from people saying, hello, state and local leaders do something.

This isn't this isn't something that we can say is going to happen in ten more years.

This might happen again in six months like it did last year.

And so interestingly, our Selectboard had an extra meeting already planned for the end of this month.

And this is supposed to be an anniversary story from last year's flood, but it kind of got overtaken by events.

But they had a special meeting that they're still going to have to talk about mitigation.

The state right now has a grant deadline in August.

We're going to hear a lot of this, I think, in the next few weeks all around Vermont, where there's a deadline from the state for municipalities to submit mitigation project ideas.

So there's federal funding available to cities and towns to be able to apply for projects.

The state just wants the towns to send them a list.

Give us your top five, six, whatever.

Seven list ideas for projects and we're already are.

Our town manager has a list or Selectboard has a list.

They're going to have a community meeting and they're going to want to share that list and also get more ideas because it's really time for them to start looking at, you know, how do you make the landscape more friendly to floods so that there's more floodplain capacity and the floods are low, flood waters aren't coming in to neighborhoods.

What can we do to some of our infrastructure, like storm drains and wastewater treatment plants?

All those alerts that we saw during the flood were really scary to see how all the wastewater plants were just overflowing.

Right.

So it's time, I think, for them to start really thinking of really specific projects city by city, town by town, which to think about this stuff, you know, for the future and to think ahead.

I have to think.

Yeah, go ahead, Abigail, please.

To make sure, you know, like very striking to hear you say that.

Lisa, I, I'm like also thinking about some of the conversations I heard from had with town managers out in communities that were impacted this time around.

You know, we had the Flood Safety Act that was passed by the legislature this year, which is a broad, sweeping, sort of forward looking goal piece of legislation aimed at restricting new development in places that flood.

But, you know, I, I was really hearing from a lot of town leaders, too, you know, and also just Vermonters.

What is the short term solution for us?

And so I think when we think about adapting to climate change, there is the long term of what do we want our infrastructure and our communities to look like in the future.

But then people are also up against the fact that they've been flooded three times a year and they need help managing tomorrow.

Exactly.

And one of those places has got to be Barre.

What are people saying?

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, I was going around downtown the the day before the flood actually hit cause it hit Berry that night, Wednesday night.

And honestly and I relate very deeply to this, it felt like denial before the flood really hit because people thought this can't possibly like this is a year to almost yeah it almost felt like a sick joke right.

Is what I heard from a lot of folks.

Lo and behold, it did happen again.

Digger had a really good story this week from one of our interns.

One, he interviewed a husband, wife and a little baby or the baby didn't interview, but he has an interview.

I spoke to the baby this and they live in a home that has flooded thrice within one year.

This, I believe she's a six month old baby, has lived in constant flooding times and they applied for a buyout.

They wanted their home to be bought out.

They said that this is not sustainable.

We can't keep doing this.

We're worried for our baby.

She's crawling on these floors and we're worried about mold and toxicity and they were denied because Bury finds itself in this situation where so many people live in really vulnerable locations.

Too many people essentially applied to be bought out and Bury can't afford to take that many properties off the grant list because we still need, you know, property tax.

We need the tax revenue to fund the city and the schools and everything that you use taxes for.

It's like this horrible catch 22 that people find themselves in.

And even when you do all of the right things and you're even willing to uproot your life, you're not getting help.

And for some people that that want to to to move, they can't.

And it depends on your circumstances.

It's really, really hard.

Yeah.

Lisa, you were also saying that there was a forum recently the Waterbury House primary forum, where candidates got together to talk about things, but it ended up really being about the floods right now in some ways, to some degree, yes.

We had a forum on Wednesday night.

We have a house race in our district, the Washington shit in a district that is Waterbury, Huntington, Bolton and Bills Gore.

We've got two incumbent Democratic state reps that are running again.

Tom Stevens and Theresa Wood.

And there's a Democratic challenger who's a new candidate this year.

Her name is Elizabeth Brown.

And there's one Republican on the ticket, Jonathan Griffin.

They're all from Waterbury.

Interestingly, too.

Yes.

Represent this district.

They had a forum in Waterbury.

They were supposed to have one in Huntington last Thursday that got canceled.

No one can figure out even how to get to Huntington that night.

And so they had about 100 or so people show up at the fire station for this.

And the idea was for them to really hear from the community.

The candidates each spoke for a few minutes at the beginning of the end, but it wasn't really a debate or, you know, putting lots of questions to them, but they wanted to hear from the community and people just sort of one by one went up to a podium and ask questions or probably a few dozen people were able to ask, ask questions and offer comments.

And we know this issue about, you know, the whole buyouts and housing the whole housing crisis in Waterbury, kind of in Vermont, kind of layers over this this flood mitigation and flood response thing, too.

So somebody applies for a buyout that their property becomes in perpetuity, not someplace that you can build on again.

All right.

So there's this question of like if we start taking properties, you know, and take houses off the tax rolls, but also get rid of houses.

How do we now have fewer houses to live in?

And that's we already have too few to begin with.

So you know that affordability issue.

Another big issue that was a huge topic for lots of people was still the residual, you know, feedback from the whole school budget debacle that we saw this this spring where it took us in our district.

It took three times to pass a school budget and they really want to see the state legislators trying to crack that nut this coming session to come up with a better a better answer on how the school funding piece comes together.

Yeah, we saw a lot of communities dealing with that as well.

We're going to shift topics now and get off the flooding.

But unfortunately, I can't say there's a lot of relief in the topic here.

This is also causing some angst.

Let's talk a little bit about Senator Peter Welch, who was the first Democratic senator to call for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race.

He does not think that Biden can defeat Trump.

Here's what Welch had to say about that.

We have to keep Trump out of the White House.

That's an existential threat to our democracy.

We have to have our best candidates.

The debate was very damaging.

It's a real setback in it raised questions going into the debate.

There was a lot of questions about President Biden's age coming out of the debate.

That's increased enormously.

Okay.

Now, since that's happened, a second Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana has also now called for Biden to step away.

Sara, I know you've been doing some reporting on this.

What fascinates me about this is that the senior senator in Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is saying the exact opposite thing.

He is backing Joe Biden, saying Biden should stay in the race.

What have you been hearing?

I would say that Senator Sanders has been one of the most vocal supporters of Biden in this moment and has really visibly thrown his weight behind Biden right now.

You know, there is so much infighting essentially that's happening within the Democratic Party.

We've heard reports of former President Obama even having a sort of heart to heart conversation with Biden about this.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now making the rounds, making phone calls.

And I think the the thing that Senator Welch is getting at what he told me, it was very shortly, actually, before he called on Biden to step down or step aside, I was on the phone with him.

He said, people can't unsee that debate, that those clips will live on and on in perpetuity.

And that image is going to be seared in people's head of the president in this moment.

And that he essentially doubts that Biden can beat Trump this this election cycle.

Now, Sanders and what we're seeing from interestingly, perhaps counter to what you might think some really progressive members of the of Congress have all been throwing their weight behind Biden.

And what I'm my sense of things is that they're very concerned about some of the kind of downstream effects if a different candidate were sort of anointed and in Biden's place.

Obviously, the big name being thrown around is Vice President Kamala Harris.

You know, they say it would only take one or two states where Republicans could foreseeably challenge in court the ability for anyone else's name to appear on the ballot because Biden did win the primary.

And so if you lose, say, Pennsylvania, Ohio, because Vice President Harris cannot legally appear on the ballot, if that is the court decision that's made, there's the Electoral College.

Right.

Right.

So it's it's really a it's a big gamble.

Is there a gamble for Peter Welch with his constituency in in taking this tack?

I mean, is he getting any pushback from the people that he represents here in Vermont, saying, hey, you're supposed to be backing the president?

I mean, I feel like I can only say like sort of anecdotally, like I saw some hubbub on social media about up elections that really there's a lot of pushback on social media if it ever was.

And so I think that there is, though, like this idea of loyalty, right, to your your party leader.

And that is, I think, an existential question facing all Democrats right now.

As you can see, they are facing Republicans, too, right.

Like we just had this RNC in Milwaukee.

And, you know, there was a lot of talk about the messaging being around unity.

And, you know, Nikki Haley spoke at the RNC, obviously a former opponent to the former president Trump, and almost like a Never Trumper type.

Now throwing her weight behind him.

Meanwhile, all of our Republican presidents and vice presidents in recent history did not attend the RNC.

So it's not just a Democratic issue, right?

This this kind of infighting that's happening.

I mean, this is clearly happening in both camps right now.

And I know you spoke with Paul Dahm, the head of Vermont's Republican Party, who was saying there's an opportunity here for President Trump to, you know, show that unified side.

A new Trump, he called it.

We're speaking now the night after the RNC.

That didn't really happen, did it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There was no pivot there to a kinder, gentler.

I mean, I think that when could.

It was a 90 minute long speech to that that Trump made at the RNC.

So there's a lot to kind of unpack there.

But I think what's really important for reporters, especially right now, is to not necessarily cover speeches and lines, you know, soundbites and to actually look at policies.

And if you're looking at policies, I don't think you can just say with a straight face that all too much has changed since Trump last held the White House.

Well, there is going to be a lot to pass over just over the next three or four months.

And I appreciate you giving us an update on that situation.

I want to let people know that next week we're going to have a some special coverage we're going to have live at noon.

On the radio side of things, the Democratic gubernatorial primary debate.

And you can check that out.

You can also see that at 7:00 in the evening on your local PBS station.

And I want to thank our guests.

This this was a fast show, but I really we had so much to talk about.

And thank you so much for your expertize.

Lisa Scagliotti and Sarah Mearhoff and Abagael Giles of Vermont Public, thank you so much for being here today.

I'm Mitch Wertlieb.

Thank you for watching at home and listening.

And we will see you soon, hopefully next week for Vermont.

This week.