‘Living in a nightmare’: On Lyndonville’s Red Village Road, this week’s storm nearly took lives

LYNDONVILLE — Leena Aly has been trying to avoid thinking about what almost happened to her early Tuesday morning.

Aly, a fourth-year student of dental health at the University of New England in Portland, Maine, had been living in a tiny home on Red Village Road during a rotation at St. Johnsbury Dental Associates. On Monday evening, the sky was clear, she said. She didn’t know it was going to rain.

At midnight, she woke to a flood alarm on her phone, of the sort she’s “gotten pretty often this past summer,” she told VTDigger on Wednesday. She closed the windows of the tiny home as a precautionary measure.

Sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., she looked outside the window. Normally she could see gravel, power lines and a generator, but this time she could only see flowing water and lightning.

“The water just seemed really, really close,” she said. “The noise was a lot closer than it normally is.”

Aly ran a few small laps within the tiny home, she said, trying to determine what to do next. Outside the window, her car appeared to be where she had parked it earlier that night, and the ground appeared to be stable. She decided she needed to leave, so she gathered her purse, clutched her phone, and in her sleep apparel — shorts and a tank top — she opened the door, then felt the tiny home shake. Its corner, facing the river, had dipped, she said.

The river ran below the deck. This was her only way out, so she stepped into the water.

“I remember, I stepped with my right foot,” she said. “I stepped with my right foot off of the tiny house, the steps, and I immediately was in the water. I had no chance to stand. There was no standing.”

The current pulled Aly onto her stomach. She let go of her purse and watched the distance between her and the tiny house grow. She remembers tumbling underwater. When she could, she screamed for help.

“It was really just a moment of just battling with the elements,” she said. “And I’ve never in my life thought I could be that close to death.”

Aly tried to catch anything she could see or touch. She grabbed a tree branch, which broke, and she drifted farther. Somehow, she held onto her phone, grabbed hold of another branch, and dialed 9-1-1. The first time, the call didn’t go through. The second time, the call disconnected, and when the dispatcher called back, she struggled to answer with wet hands. The third time, she reached a dispatcher, who stayed on the phone with her for the next half hour, the entirety of which she remained in the water.

“Every time I hung onto something, it would just break,” she said. “It was literally just coming unbound from the bottom. It wasn’t even the branch breaking. It was just completely coming unearthed.”

The dispatcher told Aly that crews were trying to find her but couldn’t navigate the road, pieces of which the river had completely swept away.

In the water, Aly could only see clearly when lightning brightened the sky. She watched as trees “from the top of the hill were falling completely, from the bottom.” She remembers watching the river pull the tiny home into its current, then pull her car in. On Wednesday afternoon, a crumpled piece of the tiny home was tangled in a pile of logs and other debris. Aly’s car, crushed, sat down the road in a field strewn with mud.

While waiting for the crews to find her, she tried to make her way to the water’s edge. The dispatcher told her that help was on the way, but after about 20 minutes Aly started to panic because she understood that no one was there. Water had submerged everything around her.

“I was screaming and crying for help, and the road itself was full of trees that had fallen and toppled over, and all I could see were just waves of water carrying things,” she said.

Then, her luck turned. The dispatcher asked if she could remember the names of her neighbors, and she remembered meeting a child named Hazel, the same name as her dog. She told the dispatcher, who used the name to locate the family: Rose Reynolds and Keith Upham, located directly across the street from where she grasped branches in the water.

Reynolds told VTDigger she stayed on the line with a different dispatcher while Upham, a former EMT, began looking for Aly.

Meanwhile, water briefly receded over the road, Aly said. Reynolds and Upham had lost power, so Upham turned on his truck lights to try to see Aly, who in turn saw her path forward. She wondered whether the ground was stable, and whether she could walk on it. She said she “decided it was either that or I was gonna die there because there really was no sign of any rescue whatsoever.”

She let go of the tree she’d clung to, “climbed up as hard as I could,” and walked out of the river.

She walked across the road, where she found Upham, who took her by the hand and led her into his family’s house, she said. There, Reynolds gave Aly new clothes and blankets, Aly said. She coughed up mud.

Members of the fire department arrived at Reynolds’ house at dawn to conduct a wellness check on residents of the road and told everyone to shelter in place, Aly said. Reynolds alerted the crew that the “girl that was in the river” was in her living room, and Aly convinced them to take her to the hospital. The only way out was to hike.

At the hospital, doctors confirmed that Aly had fluid in her lungs, and she received treatment to prevent pneumonia, she said.

“I am pretty banged up and bruised up and scratched up in a lot of areas, but thankfully, nothing was broken,” she said. “I didn’t have any traumatic physical injury, so I’m very lucky in that sense.”

Now, she’s home in Concord, New Hampshire.

Reynolds and Upham, along with two children, one of whom is 7 months old, evacuated later Tuesday, Reynolds told VTDigger. Though her house remained intact, her basement flooded and she didn’t have water, an untenable situation with her children.

The damage has made her road, and her home, unrecognizable, she said.

“It looks like a totally different place,” she said. “It’s like we were dropped out of the sky, and now we’re in a new town or something.”

In total, the river destroyed three homes on the south side of the road. One of those houses belonged to Jeremy and Shani Greer, who have three children, ages 6, 8 and 14.

Shani woke at 2:15 a.m., on Tuesday and realized the home was flooding, Jeremy said. The family left the house by 3 a.m. Jeremy tried to return briefly to get food for their animals and a cat litter box they’d forgotten.

He pulled up to his mailboxes and “watched the road disappear, just up past the house, where the water breached the road and washed it out.”

“I said, ‘Hell no, I’m turning around. I don’t care about animal food,’” he said.

For now, the Greers are staying at a friend’s camp in Barton. Jeremy said he feels like he’s “living in a nightmare,” like he’s “waiting to wake up.”

“Twenty minutes ago, I just had to sit here and explain to two small children that we don’t have a home,” he said on Wednesday evening.

The Greers have visited their former property, where there’s little trace of the home that stood there since 1950 without any major flooding incidents, according to Jeremy. They walked along the river, which had subsided, and found their belongings among the mud and rocks: photos of their kids, a pillow made with Shani’s late father’s clothing, their daughter’s first T-ball bat.

Aly, too, is still trying to understand the week’s events. She slept on Tuesday night with the help of medication, she said.

“I was dreaming about drowning. I don’t know when I’ll get over this,” she said. She doesn’t know how to process it, or how to “break it apart, other than: I really almost died.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Living in a nightmare’: On Lyndonville’s Red Village Road, this week’s storm nearly took lives .