Hi, I study (among other things) watersheds and rivers and flood policy, and I live in Vermont (and in fact was an evacuee) so perhaps I can offer some other thoughts on this.
I fully agree with the points people are making that people should not have built in the way they did in floodplains, that people should not try to control nature, and also feel that most floods are as much anthropomorphic (due to watershed degradation, etc) as natural disasters. That being said, the Vermont flood situation is VERY different. Our state is one of the most (re)- forested in the nation, and while we have our share of ecological problems like anyone else, our watersheds are in really good shape. In particular, most Irene flooding came from the Green Mountains, where orographic factors caused the rain to be the heaviest, and the Greens are almost entirely forest (preserved areas and timberland that is for the most part well managed.) Impervious substrates, type conversion, and so many of the other problems facing the United States are not major problems in most of these watersheds that had flooding. With the possible exception of climate change (though we can't say for sure with one specific storm), this is not a human-caused flood. I come from southern California, where the river systems are very flashy: most are dry for the entire summer, except for a few spring-fed creeks... but in winter, massive wet storms can dump 20+ inches of rain in the mountains, causing immense floods. (California is also dealing with lots of watershed degradation as mentioned above). When I moved to Vermont I was amazed at the old infrastructure - mill buildings, homes, etc, that were literally hanging into rivers. These aren't new buildings that keep getting rebuilt - these are buildings over 100 years old that did not wash away (except, in some cases, last month). Why? Vermont's winters have a well-deserved reputation for being cold, snowy, and harsh, but the summers are very gentle here. The 11+ inches of rain we had in Irene was a state record and a freak event... whereas in southern California our family cabin in the San Bernardino mountains got over 20 inches of rain in 24 hours, and the damage during that event was much less than the damage caused by Irene. We certainly need to change our relationship with rivers. If Irene is a climate change related even and we are going to get more storms like this, we absolutely need to rebuild wisely, and far from the rivers. But it's important to see this for what it is - a freak event (or sign of change) that had very little precedent - the massive Vermont floods of the 1920s and 1930s were as much a response to deforestation as to rainfall. Someone mentioned that 'all of Vermont is in a flood plain' but that is not actually true. Very little of Vermont is in a flood plain, but almost all of Vermont is prone to flash floods. The only places safe from flash floods are the immense old glacial lakebeds (and in part flood plains) of the Champlain and Connecticut valleys. Surprisingly, the swamps, lowlands, and flood plains that fill up with water every spring did not have record floods during Irene, and the water in some of the mainstem rivers wasn't much higher than during the spring snowmelt. This was an upper watershed event, and as such, a lot more complicated than people building in a flood plain. That being said, we absolutely need to take this crisis as also a teaching point, and make changes. I wrote a bit about that in my blog and will provide a link rather than posting it here since it is a bit long, but check it out if you're interested: http://slowwatermovement.blogspot.com/2011/08/preparing-for-or-preventing-next.html Thanks! -Charlie Hohn Slowwatermovement.blogspot.com
