Landslides and slurries have damaged homes, roads and driveways after this month’s flood

MORETOWN — On the afternoon of July 23, Kevin Sweeney stood on the portion of his driveway that remained and gazed out at a trough of fleshy earth, where the rest of his driveway used to be.

The storm that swept across Vermont on July 10 turned a typically small brook, which ran across the terrain uphill from him, into a raging river. It hit a blocked culvert, changed direction, and poured across his driveway and that of his uphill neighbors.

At some point that night, the land slid downhill, removing a wedge of earth from the landscape like a slice from a pie.

“Once it started, it went really fast, and took that whole road with it,” said Ben DeJong, the state geologist. “It’s just stunning — it’s stunning how one 24-hour event can cause this amount of damage.”

Deep mud caked the bottom of the hill, near the private drive’s entrance to U.S. Route 2, half-burying Sweeney’s downhill neighbor’s SUV. Sweeney and his neighbors now use a path through the woods to access their homes, and have rented and borrowed cars, parked at the bottom of the hill, so they can leave the property. Edge Drive — a private road that serves only four homes, and that residents are responsible for repairing — is almost entirely gone.

One contractor told Sweeney it would cost between $55,000 and $60,000 to fix the road, not including materials: 40 to 50 truckloads of dirt.

There hasn’t been similar water damage in the property’s history, Sweeney said. He moved into the house with his wife, Virginia, exactly a year earlier, and while the floods of July 2023 caused the couple to delay their move-in date by a few days because of water flowing over a nearby road, the stream in their backyard didn’t create trouble. The previous property owner said the land fared fine during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 as well, Sweeney said.

“I put 95% of my savings into getting a house, because we wanted to — you know, this is the last place we’re gonna live,” Sweeney said. “I wasn’t expecting this. We just don’t have the resources to pay for it.”

Many Vermonters have become familiar with the threat of flooding after repeated extreme rain events throughout the last decade, including three major storms since last July. But widespread landslides are a newer phenomenon — and sometimes harder to predict and prevent.

Extreme weather events and an expected increase in precipitation caused by climate change could make landslides more common in Vermont, experts say.

“Unlike floods, there isn’t necessarily a straight-line connection between rain flow and landslides,” Julie Moore, secretary of Agency of Natural Resources, told reporters at a press conference on July 19 with Gov. Phil Scott and other administration members.

“However, a growing body of Vermont-specific work indicates that 3 to 5 inches of precipitation can trigger failures that can lead to landslides, particularly when the ground is already saturated,” Moore said.

Last year, state scientists evaluated more than 70 fallen slopes and potential landslides after the summer floods — unprecedented in recent history. In the aftermath of this year’s floods, geologists found fewer landslides, according to DeJong.

That’s partly because last year’s storm ran in a north-south direction over mountainous terrain, while this year, the storm traveled from west to east, passing over a smaller stretch of mountains.

“Last year, we had relatively saturated slopes, and then we put a whole lot of water on it in the steep domains of the Green Mountains,” he said. That prompted “a lot of landslides far and away from” rivers and streams.

This time, rivers and streams often eroded their banks beneath steep land, causing those slopes to fail.

DeJong’s team has responded to roughly 20 requests to evaluate possible landslides since the storm earlier this month. Most have been neatly planted along the east-west section of the state where rain fell most heavily, he said.

Of those, two caused severe damage to homes that may result in buyouts. For four others, DeJong is “not concerned necessarily about human life or injury, it’s more getting infrastructure back in place so that people can get back to their homes in their lives.”

Plainfield was hit particularly hard, he said.

Many of the geological events that occurred in the last two weeks are not technically landslides, which he defines as “the failure of a slope.” Rather, residents are seeing “large piles of debris,” often from a “teeny little brook that jumped to life and exported every bit of sediment that was in its path, and then burped it out into somebody’s yard.”

The event by Sweeney’s home probably wasn’t a landslide, DeJong said, but rather an “erosional feature.”

“If you were standing at the base of it when it went, you might be tempted to think it looked like a landslide,” he said. “But it was probably a channel at that moment that became almost like a mud flow for about 30 seconds.”

Sweeney, who had come to adore the brook that had rambled gently through his property, is now wondering how he and his neighbors will be able to recover from the damage it caused.

Neighbors have questioned whether the culvert, if it were upsized and cleared beforehand, could have handled the flow and kept the water in its original channel.

“We are now realizing it’s really difficult to know how to design this infrastructure,” DeJong said. “It’s worked for many years, for many decades, and suddenly, we’re getting these storms that are so intense that it like changes the game, it changes the math in some fundamental way.”

Fixing that infrastructure “is probably prohibitively expensive, because we simply cannot go rip up every culvert in the state thinking that, maybe, the next pop-up extreme storm is going to be along this other brook,” he said.

Municipal road crews don’t fix private roads, putting those like the Sweeneys in a tough spot.

“There are a lot of Vermont families in this situation right now, where long driveways, private bridges, have been destroyed, damaged, compromised,” said Ben Rose, recovery section chief at Vermont Emergency Management. “The short answer is that that is their legal responsibility to repair.”

“There is no federal funding program or state program which is specifically designed to help people with private access repairs,” he said.

However, the Federal Emergency Management Agency could make individual assistance available to those with damage on private property, but Rose said it’s hard to know how much they would receive. If FEMA declares that individual assistance will be available, the aid could come before winter, he said.

People should take pictures and measurements of the damage, and keep invoices to document their costs, he said.

“In the meanwhile, people should be going ahead and incurring the costs, fixing what needs to be fixed, doing what they need to do to move forward,” he said.

Those who discover evidence of landslides or potential landslides can report their findings to the Vermont Geological Survey to be evaluated.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Landslides and slurries have damaged homes, roads and driveways after this month’s flood .