In Johnson, many flood-damaged essential services remain in limbo

This is Part 2 of Downstream, a 9-part series looking at what’s changed — and what hasn’t — one year after catastrophic floods swept through Vermont.

JOHNSON — Standing inside this town’s wastewater treatment plant on a recent afternoon, Thomas Galinat pointed to the cracks in the walls and jury-rigged electronics. The plant’s offices sit empty — never put back together, he said, after the building filled with eight feet of water during last July’s devastating floods .

Its wastewater treatment operations were knocked out for about a month, during which local officials said they had no choice but to pump untreated sewage into the Lamoille and Gihon rivers, which meet at an oxbow just a few hundred feet down the hill.

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Today the facility, while operational, remains in a state of limbo as officials contemplate its future. The key question: Should Johnson keep the wastewater plant where it is, making structural changes to improve its flood resilience? Or, should it undertake the costly endeavor of rebuilding the flood-prone facility elsewhere?

The answer will have impacts far beyond its walls, said Galinat, the town administrator.

“This, here, is the linchpin for the entire future of Johnson,” he said.

Johnson’s downtown is also built around the Lamoille and Gihon rivers, and the post office, public library and sole grocery store all filled with floodwater last July. The damage these and other buildings sustained has led some officials to wonder whether it even makes sense to fully reconstruct the heart of the town where it is.

“How do you maintain a downtown when the downtown is at risk?” Galinat said. “We were always on the river. But if you can’t be on the river anymore, where is the future of Johnson going to be?”

‘It’s going to flood again’

Johnson’s wastewater plant was one of 33 whose operations were impacted by last summer’s flooding. In the year since, all of the damaged facilities have resumed normal operations, according to a state Agency of Natural Resources spokesperson.

Stephanie Brackin said in an email that state officials met in recent weeks with leaders in Johnson — as well as in Hardwick and Ludlow, two other towns that were among those hardest hit by last summer’s flooding — to discuss the feasibility of relocating their sewage plants, among other options.

The wastewater plant in Johnson has flooded at least three times since it was built in 1995, according to Tim Hall, who’s worked at the plant for the past six years. One of those floods happened just two weeks before the plant, which is owned and operated by the Village of Johnson, was set to open, he said.

“It’s going to flood again,” Hall said. “What are you going to do?”

But Johnson officials are in a holding pattern until the Federal Emergency Management Administration decides whether the government will pay for improvements at the existing plant, or whether access to federal funds will instead be contingent on building a new plant elsewhere.

A new plant would cost at least $25 million, Galinat said. He said engineers are currently working out final designs and cost estimates for both options, with a report expected later this year. FEMA needs that report before making the call on funding, according to local and state and local officials.

At this point, “it doesn’t matter what the answer is,” the town administrator said. But without an answer, he said, “the town can’t move forward with its other projects.”

There is more riding on FEMA’s decision than it might seem. That’s because preliminary work has shown that the most feasible location for a new plant is farther up the hill — where the town and village of Johnson’s municipal office building is located.

The first floor of the municipal building was flooded out last July, too. And while the resulting damage has largely been repaired, officials have held off on making further improvements and fully reopening the building to the public, according to Galinat, in case they need to tear it down in order to build a new wastewater plant.

The first floor of the municipal building is still mostly empty. Offices for both town and village staff, as well as a makeshift meeting space for local boards, have been consolidated on the second floor. It’s a sea of desks and chairs and wires and papers with little privacy.

Galinat prefers the quiet of the first floor. Every day, he brings his work equipment in and out of the building in a cardboard box; he sits down at a folding chair and a folding table, the same table that also gets used upstairs for selectboard meetings.

Before the flooding, the building’s second floor served as a community meeting space, hosting everything from sewing nights to the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. A back room was the town’s de facto senior center. But since last July, those groups have had to meet elsewhere.

Town officials have heard repeatedly from locals who are frustrated about the continued lack of public meeting space, Galinat said. He’s not always sure how to explain the town’s position — and he worries that the situation is eroding trust in local government.

Another blow to community space in Johnson, according to Galinat: The town hasn’t had a grocery store since its sole market suffered heavy damage in last summer’s flooding.

The owners of Sterling Market said last fall that they would not reopen the store , which sits along the Gihon River’s shore. Earlier this year, though, the building’s owner said that the New England grocery chain Shaw’s was interested in opening up a location there.

The town administrator said that can’t come soon enough.

“With the store, people would come here and you might also grab dinner. You might go to the bank,” he said, walking along Main Street past the former store, where the only marker left of its presence is a faint outline of its name above the front door.

“Now,” Galinat continued, “you see less traffic downtown because the core hub — the market — isn’t getting people from surrounding towns into Johnson.”

Other public buildings in Johnson have reopened, to varying degrees. The town’s post office, which is in the same building as the former grocery store, came back online in December. Three months earlier, the town opened a temporary public library in the basement of the Masonic lodge, after its 100-plus-year-old library flooded in July.

The library building on Railroad Street — probably the worst-hit block in town — is still largely gutted, except for some new insulation. The town has applied for a state grant to fund an ambitious plan to pick the building up off its foundation and move it somewhere less vulnerable to major flooding, though work hasn’t started yet.

On a recent afternoon at the temporary space, library director Jeanne Engel was busy helping a group of young children check out books. She sat at a small folding table draped in a tablecloth, with colorful curtains strung up behind her. The curtains cloak piles of boxes holding the majority of the library’s roughly 15,000-book collection.

Engel has lived in Johnson for four decades. She said it’s well past time for the town to seriously consider where it builds its key public facilities, like the one she runs.

“I think a lot of people are just going to put things back the way it was before. And I just think, personally, that we need to not continue to rebuild on the floodplain — as far as buildings and infrastructure,” she said, as Galinat stood nearby, nodding his head.

While Engel’s home wasn’t damaged in the flooding, many others were. About 190 households or individuals in Johnson applied for FEMA aid, according to federal data, and aid recipients in town have since received about $1 million from the agency.

At the same time, several local leaders said that some people packed up after the flooding and never came back to their damaged houses or apartments.

According to data from the Lamoille Area Recovery Network — one of the long-term support groups set up statewide after the flooding — 17% of primary homeowners in Lamoille County who applied for FEMA aid have since moved, and more than half have left Lamoille County.

Galinat said the town is considering buying out certain properties that back up to Lamoille and Gihon rivers through a joint federal and state program. He said officials need to seriously consider whether a community built around two waterways can stay that way in the decades to come.

But those big conversations are only just starting, he said. Recovery is still not over.

Just a few weeks ago, public works staff from the town and village cleared a final trove of water-damaged records out of the vault in the municipal offices, which filled with a foot of water last summer. A large air purifier was still running in the room.

Galinat said the cleanup was a marker of progress, albeit a small one. It had some symbolic value, too, he said.

The town and village governments have long had “a pretty contentious relationship,” he explained. But the flood has forced officials to work arm-in-arm over the past year — and in the case of a flood-damaged building, to work in the same room.

“You’re forcing cooperation,” Galinat said. “Anything we do, we have to do together.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Johnson, many flood-damaged essential services remain in limbo .