‘Beyond my wildest dreams’: In hard-hit Lyndon, residents grapple with flood aftermath

Updated at 4:01 p.m.

LYNDON—  The Gervais family, who own Greg’s Auto Repair on U.S. Route 5, set out in kayaks Thursday morning to assess the damage.

The tops of cars poked out from the brown overflow of the Passumpsic River, including those left by the auto shop’s customers.

“This is the worst I’ve seen,” said Jelena Gervais, who owns the shop with her husband Greg.

It was the third time in 20 years that their business had flooded, but this was by far the worst, she said. Such devastation was “not at all” on her radar Wednesday night, when the remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl unloaded more than 5 inches of rain over parts of central Vermont.

Gervais believed the shop would be okay — open Friday even. What she worried about was a home down the road the family had sold to folks from Barre. The buyers, she sighed, had fled the Granite City after last summer’s flooding.

“That bothers me the most,” Gervais said.

Further down Route 5, Sean Somers, 60, and Jim Gregory, 64, waxed hyperbolic about the water spread before them.

“We’ve never, ever, ever come close to seeing this,” Gregory said.

While Route 5 floods with some regularity, “it never got so high that you couldn’t drive on the top of it,” Somers said.

The two men, aghast, gestured to the tops of vehicles almost entirely submerged.

“Beyond my wildest dreams,” Gregory said.

Just north of the village in Lyndon town, rescuers arrived by boat at Charles Keefer’s home just after 5 a.m.

The two men in a raft motored through the manufactured home park along the Passumpsic River bank, pulling people and their pets to safety.

Keefer and his wife decided to leave their cat Joey behind, perched next to dry litter, food and water.

“Cat’s still on the bed, meowing away,” said Keefer, returning from a wet wade through brown water to his flooded unit.

Since moving to the park in 1999, Keefer has had to evacuate about a half dozen times. Twice, as of this morning, by boat.

But water had never entered his home, he said, until Thursday.

While paying off his mortgage, Keefer kept flood insurance. He watched after Irene, when his neighbors — all without insurance, he said — received five-figure checks from FEMA, and he was stuck battling a corporation for a payout. The money came eventually, he said, but his neighbors had already rebuilt their homes with federal dollars.

So now, mortgage paid, Keefer no longer has flood insurance. The cost, about $3,000 per year, didn’t seem worth it. Maybe he’ll get FEMA money this time, he thought aloud, “buy an RV and get on the road.”

His wife wondered if the flood wasn’t a sign.

“Is this god’s way of telling me to move, move on?”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Beyond my wildest dreams’: In hard-hit Lyndon, residents grapple with flood aftermath .