Flooded 3 times in a year but denied a buyout, Barre family looks for an out

BARRE CITY — Kate O’Day uses her daughter’s age to measure the time between the floods.

She was seven months pregnant with Oona last summer when the Stevens Branch jumped its banks, swept across 100 feet to her house and poured 7 feet of water into the basement.

Convinced the house would flood again, and worried about the long-term health effects of living there, O’Day and her husband, Nick Roos, applied for a buyout last fall through a Federal Emergency Management Agency program that makes funds available for towns to purchase properties in flood-prone areas.

Oona was two months old in December when the basement took in 8 inches of water after unseasonably strong rains. In February, the couple learned their buyout application had been denied.

Last week, when the rain-swollen river visited another five and a half feet of water upon the basement, little Oona was nine months old — a lively, laughing girl pulling herself up on armchairs to stand.

“I’m so worried about her being here,” said O’Day. “She’s crawling around. I’m constantly just cleaning the floors.”

Roos had spent that morning doing the same thing he’d done twice already: cleaning out muck from the basement. It is the composition of this leftover sludge — the potential toxic solvents, gasoline, or paint — that worries O’Day the most. Roos became violently ill during the previous cleanup, with what he believed was norovirus from sewage dumped into the basement. To protect his then-newborn daughter, he went into quarantine.

“Everything in the city comes into your house. We are living on top of a vat of toxic waste,” said O’Day.

Balancing her baby daughter on her hip in the kitchen, she pointed through the window to a metal tank of diesel the river had washed up. “The fire department flipped it over because it was spilling fuel over our yard,” she said.

With redoubled frustration that the city rejected their buyout request, Roos and O’Day face their third flood recovery in a year, with no guarantee it will be their last.

Nick Storellicastro, Barre’s city manager, is in charge of approving buyouts. He said of the 62 applications the city has received, the city is moving forward with 20, the ones “right along the river.”

Since Roos and O’Day’s house is 100 feet back, the city denied their request.

Barre “can’t afford to buy houses for people not along the river,” according to Storellicastro, because properties bought-out with FEMA funds must become permanent green spaces . The city simply can’t lose more housing space, according to Storellicastro, nor can the city’s budget — already “in dire straits” from last summer’s flood — absorb any further loss of property tax revenue.

“If there was a way to buy these people out — to help them escape those traps — but be able to rebuild a safe house there… I would’ve approved every application,” said Storellicastro.

For Roos and O’Day, persisting in this seemingly endless cycle between disaster and recovery is an untenable status quo. After last summer, their insurance company covered $32,000 to restore the structure of their house to its pre-flood condition — a house Roos bought in 2017 for $70,000

The couple had to pay a further $8,000 out of pocket to replace items like their washer and dryer. How much damage, in dollars, this latest flood has caused is still unclear, but the couple will have to replace their brand-new washer and dryer again.

“That’s $2,400 dollars, out of pocket, gone. I put them on a platform, but nope,” said Roos.

To make matters worse, Roos said the family received two letters from the city around Christmas, telling them they had three years to bring the house up to code, which includes bringing their utilities out of the basement and elevating the house.

“Putting these houses on piers is solving nothing, that inherently implies that the river is only going to get stronger and bigger,” said Roos.

Sinking thousands of dollars more into this house — money that would not appreciate its value — sounds like an impossibility to the couple.

“What, now I have to bleed my retirement?” said Roos.

And the couple wonders: who’s going to want to rent or buy a house in a floodway, with an unusable basement that you still pay taxes on, and all the utilities taking up square footage in the living area upstairs?

Storellicastro said he understands the anger and frustration. But, as city manager, he said he has to take into account Barre’s financial solvency.

“The FEMA process really pits homeowners against municipalities,” said Storellicastro.

He said the latest flood would not change the city’s buyout strategy. The only way Barre City could afford to buy properties beyond the riverfront, he said, is if it received state or federal grant money that had no perpetual green space requirements.

“This is the way out for some of these people, it’s with non-FEMA buyouts,” he said.

There are no “immediately active” plans for this to happen, though, according to Storellicastro, and it could take years for any such funds to be released.

For Roos and O’Day, the decision is clear. One way or another, for the good of their daughter, they’re leaving Barre, and Vermont, for good.

“I just don’t know why anybody would want to live here anymore,” said O’Day.

Both Roos and O’Day work in the mental health field, an area of high staffing need in the region and statewide. Roos is an embedded crisis clinician with the Vermont State Police out of the Berlin barracks. O’Day is the statewide program coordinator for the Vermont Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health.

The couple said they would try to sell the house to a private equity firm like Blackrock. Their loan principal right now is $58,000, according to Roos. If private equity offers $50,000, he said, it’s cheaper to come up with the $8,000 difference than it would be to bring the house up to code.

“And they would just sell it to another family that’s going to suffer the same thing in two years,” said Roos, shaking his head.

In the living room, little Oona tumbled around and laughed happily as her parents spoke. Every so often, the couple fell silent and watched her, a little smile dispelling their tense brows. Roos and O’Day want a little brother or sister for her, but that will have to come later, once they leave.

In the meantime, they hope the weather and the river spare them any more suffering.

“Everytime it rains we look at that goddamn river,” said Roos.

O’Day nodded, remembering how she’d walked over to the bridge just two nights before:

“I went to look at the river and I saw that it was angry and I just started bawling.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Flooded 3 times in a year but denied a buyout, Barre family looks for an out .