When Irene Came to Call

Before Irene hit, I was going to write this week's posting about prepping for a hurricane in a Southern Vermont town on the Connecticut River with a brief afterword about how we fared, thinking, really, there would be little to report other than some power outage.  But it turned out to be another story entirely.  Or, as one youthful resident said when scanning the damage, "It's something else."

Earlier in the week, we realized we were smack in the middle of Irene's track.  When I checked and re-checked the cognoscenti sites, there it was--scheduled to come barreling through, as one local said, "in my front door and out my back."  Then there was the Weather Channel notice that said "Irene poses an extraordinary threat that is one no one has yet experienced from North Carolina ... to New England."

So what I did was freak out for awhile.  Then, like that saying, "Trust in God but tie up your camel," I set to work getting ready.  I figured a main problem might be downed trees since a handsome collection of enormous white pines surround all the houses up here on my little hill.  I'd fortunately had one rotted-out oak taken out this summer but, otherwise, all I could do was go out before the storm and tell my trees how perfect they looked standing right where they were and please don't move.  My next problem would be power outage.  That was pretty much a given.  But I could cook since my stove was on propane.  I had city water which didn't require an electric pump.  I had plenty of food.  Manual can-opener.  Candles, batteries, flashlights.  After that, my next problem would be a degree of run-off flowing through my cellar.  (No other flooding since I'm on that hill I mentioned.)  Having experienced several Nor'easters, I'd long since put my cellar stuff up on blocks.  I only had to roll up some carpeting.  Finally, if we got strong winds, my garden furniture would tumble downhill into the poison ivy, so I took things indoors.  I wondered about getting duct tape in case something knocked out a window and I needed to put up plastic sheeting, but I thought I'd wing that one.

A few of my glorious trees

It finally started to rain 8 PM Saturday.  I felt prepared; I'd done all I knew to do.  I went to bed.  It rained through the night; there were no high winds.  Then Sunday, it rained and rained and rained, sometimes in sheets, no surcease.  My trees were happily staying put.  I checked online and turned on the TV to see what was going on.  And if the track had shifted.  It hadn't.  The reporters were all solidly positioned beside coastal surf and in city streets.  Then the power went out--which incidentally meant I couldn't open my garage door and get out my car, but I wasn't going anywhere.  I'd been watching the new Top Chef "Just Desserts" program ... but now got out my book.  All I could hear with the house closed up was the rain  As I sat reading, I felt as if I were in an airplane, stuck in one of those reclining seats, feeling a bit anxious, just waiting "to get there."  I also realized anew how rather grim it is not to have electricity and how we as a society may one day wonder that we had anything as primitive as above-ground wires.

Then, after some 17 or 18 hours, the rain let up.  I opened my front door to poke my head out, hoping the brunt of the storm was over.  Thanks to low winds, the trees were okay; no branches covered the road.  But as I was going back in the house, I heard something that I could not identify.  It sounded like an inordinate amount of traffic on the road just down the hill.  Except no one much was out.  Or, it sounded like a river.  Except there was no river there.  Curious, I put on my rain coat and walked out, careful to keep an eye out for possible downed wires.  The road at the bottom of the hill was, indeed, empty ... except for a police car turning cars away because, as it turned out, there was such extensive damage on up ahead that the road was closed for the next 40 miles--all the way across the entire southern part of the state.  It was then I discovered what the noise was. 

Bear with me here.  News reporters like to speak of Vermont with this sort of language.  "Sweet sleepy towns."  "Babbling brooks."  All story-book stuff.  Well, while they were so heavily concentrating on the fact that New York City had actually made it through the hurricane and, oh yes, by the way, Irene was now off in New England, IRENE WAS NOW OFF IN NEW ENGLAND.  Hello, out there!  Anyone paying attention?  In this land of hills and valleys, all of our state's little babblers (already saturated from a summer of rain) had turned into raging torrents, creating flash floods no one around here had ever seen before.  That noise I heard was our local brook now crashing down, eroding its banks, brimming over, making its way toward the Connecticut River, taking out mobile homes, chunks of pavement, whole trees, picnic tables, propane tanks still hissing gas, and our local farmers market.  Then when it got down-town, it raged across streets and parking lots, into shops, offices, and a hotel lobby as it wreaked havoc with roads and bridges on the way.  It didn't take an ocean surge to destroy things; it was built right there into our mountainy story-book setting.

The "brook" next day, greatly subdued

That woke up the reporters who then came here for their aftermath stories.  Irene is now gone, I and mine (including my trees) are fine, power came back on, but our town (as many) got creamed.  I've read that in some of the small towns, country inns have been turned into emergency command centers ... money donation jars have been filling up ... people have been picking up other people's family photos along brook banks.  Here, the flood waters have subsided and bulldozers are out scraping up the mud.  Then there's that spontaneous exchange that occurs after something like this--with a postal clerk, the take-out coffee guy, the car dealership fellow who schedules your oil change.

"Everything okay with you?"
"Yeah.  You?"
"Yeah.  It was something, though."
"Yeah."

I have to admit that one image in all this rather amuses me:  a shot I saw (but don't have) of our town's wooden Loch-Ness monster--usually propped out in the water near the marina--last seen, finally free, bobbing down the Connecticut on its way to Long Island Sound.

The town's Nessie when still stationed at the local marina

Other images:
1) Try this YouTube link here by a fine videographer I happen to know.

2) Here's a good CNN series of still photos of the region.  The middle one is especially dramatic.  (Click here.)

As a P.S., a few Vermont statistics from The New York Times might be of interest though I don't know what one can do with them. 

• 13 towns isolated (all have now been accessed)
• 35 bridges taken out including 4 historic covered bridges
• A portion of every highway in the state closed, except I-91 and I-89
• Amtrak service suspended indefinitely; 4 railway bridges impassable
• 260 roads fully or partly closed
• 30 bridges fully or partly closed