CUT OFF AND HURTING
By John Curran ASSOCIATED PRESS
A dozen Vermont towns couldn’t be reached by land because of flooding. Nationally, the Hurricane Irene death toll hit 44.
ZACHARY P. STEPHENS THE BRATTLEBORO (VT.) REFORMER People stand where the Rt. 30 bridge over the West River in Jamaica, Vt., was washed away during flooding from Hurricane Irene. The National Guard was flying supplies to a dozen towns.
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NEWFANE, Vt. — National Guard helicopters rushed food and water yesterday to a dozen cut-off Vermont towns after the rainy remnants of Hurricane Irene washed out roads and bridges in a deluge that took many people in the landlocked New England state by surprise. “As soon as we can get help, we need help,” Liam McKinley said by cellphone from a mountain above flood-stricken Rochester, Vt.
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Up to 11 inches of rain from the weekend storm turned placid streams into churning, brown torrents that knocked homes off their foundations, flattened trees and took giant bites out of asphalt. At least three people died in Vermont. “There’s just a lot of disbelief on people’s faces. It came through so quickly, and there’s so much damage,” Gail Devine, director of the Woodstock Recreation Center, said as volunteers moved furniture out of the flooded basement and shoveled mud from two swimming pools.
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As crews raced to repair roads, the National Guard began flying in supplies to the towns of Cavendish, Granville, Hancock, Killington-Mendon, Marlboro, Pittsfield, Plymouth, Rochester, Stockbridge, Strafford, Stratton and Wardsboro. The Guard also used heavy-duty vehicles to bring relief to flood-stricken communities still reachable by road.
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The cut-off towns ranged in population from under 200 (Stratton) to nearly 1,400 (Cavendish). “If it’s a life-and-death situation … we would get a helicopter there to airlift them out, if we could get close to them. A lot of these areas are mountainous areas where there may not be a place to land,” said Mark Bosma, a spokesman for Vermont Emergency Management.
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There were no immediate reports of such a situation, but it took a relay operation involving two ambulances and an all-terrain vehicle to take a Killington woman in respiratory distress 13 miles to a hospital in Rutland. Floodwaters had severed the road between the two communities, said Rutland Regional Medical Center President Tom Hubner. The patient was doing fine, he said. From helicopters over Rochester, where telephones were out and damage was severe, people could be seen standing in line outside a grocery store. McKinley said the town’s restaurants and a supermarket were giving food away rather than let it spoil, and townspeople were helping each other.
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He said government agencies did a good job of warning people about the storm. “But here in Vermont, I think we just didn’t expect it and didn’t prepare for it,” he said. “I thought, ‘How could it happen here?’” Wendy Pratt, another of the few townspeople able to communicate with the outside world, posted an update on Facebook using a generator and a satellite Internet connection. She told of both devastation and New England neighborliness. “People have lost their homes, their belongings, businesses … The cemetery was flooded and caskets were lost down the river. So many areas of complete devastation,” Pratt wrote.
LUCAS JACKSON REUTERS Residents sit on their front steps as they wait for floodwaters to subside in the town of Totowa, N.J. New Jersey and Vermont continue to struggle with their worst flooding in decades, two days after remnants of Hurricane Irene hit..
Access to Rochester and Stratton by road was restored later in the day, officials said. All together, the storm has been blamed for at least 44 deaths in 13 states. More than 2.5 million people from North Carolina to Maine were still without electricity yesterday, three days after the hurricane churned up the Eastern Seaboard.
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Small towns in upstate New York — especially in the Catskills and the Adirondacks — also were besieged by floodwaters. In Pittsfield, Vt., newlyweds Marc Leibowitz and Janina Stegmeyer of New York City were stranded Sunday along with members of the wedding party and dozens of their guests after floodwaters swamped the couple’s honeymoon cottage. The honeymooners narrowly escaped a bridge collapse in a four-wheel-drive rental car. More than a dozen of the 60 or so guests were airlifted out by private helicopters yesterday.
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Michael Ricci of Woodstock, Vt., spent the day clearing debris from his backyard along the Ottauquechee River. What had been a meticulously mowed, sloping grass lawn and gorgeous flower beds was now a muddy expanse littered with debris, including wooden boards, propane tanks and a deer-hunting target. “The things we saw go down the river were just incredible,” he said. “Sheds, picnic tables, propane tanks, furnaces, refrigerators.” Yesterday, Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont defended his state’s decision not to undertake extensive evacuations before the storm arrived, noting that it was too hard to predict which communities in a rugged place such as Vermont would get hit. “You’d have to evacuate the entire state,” he said.
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William “Breck” Bowden, an expert on Vermont’s watershed at the University of Vermont, attributed the disaster to wet soil, steep hills that quickly fed the rain into streams, and the huge amount of rain. Gerald and Evangeline Monroe of Quechee, Vt., said they had no complaints about the way authorities handled the crisis. Gerald Monroe noted that some homes on one side of the river through his town were damaged, while those on the opposite banks 100 yards away were unscathed.
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About 260 roads in Vermont were closed because of storm damage, along with about 30 highway bridges. Vermont Deputy Transportation Secretary Sue Minter said the infrastructure damage was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Relief supplies arrived at Vermont’s National Guard headquarters early yesterday in a convoy of 30 trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Accompanied by Shumlin, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate toured the state by helicopter yesterday to survey the damage.
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Meanwhile, in North Carolina, where Irene blew ashore along the Outer Banks on Saturday before heading for New York and New England, Gov. Beverly Perdue said the hurricane destroyed more than 1,100 homes and caused at least $70 million in damage. Airlines said it would be days before some of the thousands stranded by Irene find their way home. Amtrak service was still out yesterday between Philadelphia and New York because of flooding in Trenton. Most commuter train service between New Jersey and New York City resumed yesterday.
Will feds have money for future disasters?
By Andrew Taylor ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — A political battle between the tea party-driven House and the Democratic-controlled Senate is threatening to slow money to the government’s main disaster-aid account, which is so low that new rebuilding projects have been put on hold to help victims of Hurricane Irene and future disasters.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has less than $800 million in its disaster coffers. A debate over whether to cut spending elsewhere in the federal budget to pay for tornado and hurricane aid seems likely to delay legislation to provide the billions of dollars needed to replenish FEMA’s disaster aid in the upcoming budget year.
- House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said the House will require offsetting spending cuts.
- Key Senate Democrats said they’ll oppose the idea of offsetting cuts when a bill funding FEMA gets under way in the Senate.
Of $130 billion provided in FEMA disaster funds over the past two decades, $110 billion has been provided as emergency funding in addition to the annual budget. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said yesterday that the number and cost of disasters have grown dramatically. “If (Cantor) believes that we can nip and tuck at the rest of the federal budget and somehow take care of disasters, he’s totally out of touch with reality,” Durbin said.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, said she will take advantage of a little-noticed provision in the recently passed debt-limit and budget deal that permits Congress to pass several billion dollars in additional FEMA disaster aid without budget cuts elsewhere. The provision in the new law would allow at least $6 billion in disaster aid to be added to the budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. Landrieu chairs the Appropriations homeland security panel responsible for FEMA’s budget. “We should address emergency aid in the way we traditionally have in the past — without political strings attached,” Landrieu said.
The Obama administration filed a $1.8 billion disaster-aid request for 2012. The House FEMA funding measure, passed in early June, provides $1 billion more in immediate disaster funding paid for, in part, by cuts to a loan program backed by the Obama administration. Landrieu isn’t getting a lot of help from the White House. Its February request for disaster funding next year is insufficient to fund pending demands from past disasters such as hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav and the massive Tennessee floods of last spring — and it threatens to slow rebuilding efforts in Joplin, Mo., and the Alabama towns devastated by tornadoes last spring.
FEMA now admits the disaster aid shortfall could approach $5 billion for the upcoming budget year, and that’s before accounting for Irene.
As a result, funds to help states and local governments rebuild from this year’s tornadoes as well as past disasters have been frozen. Instead, FEMA is only paying for the “immediate needs” of disaster-stricken communities, which include debris removal, food, water and emergency shelter.
CLOE POISSON HARTFORD COURANT Andy Weinstein of Woodbridge, Conn., looks at what Irene did to his family’s summer cottage in East Haven.
SMOKINCHOICES (and other musings) 