After flooding, Bolton is still in ‘triage stage’

BOLTON — Last Wednesday night, Carol Robert was awoken by a sound outside her Bolton home and noticed a strange smell.

“I could smell earth, that earthy smell,” she said. “So what I did is I looked out my bedroom window — and this area was all water.”

Her house was surrounded by water from the nearby Joiner Brook. That night, rescue personnel arrived to bring her to her son’s house on higher ground. Now, five days later, with floodwaters having receded across the state, Robert — and the rest of Bolton — is working to clean up.

In Bolton, which stretches from the banks of the Winooski River into the Green Mountains, floodwaters destroyed roads, soaked basements and damaged a nearby railroad line. It’s not clear exactly how much rain fell in the town, but nearby towns recorded between four and six inches.

“We’re still accounting for the total value of damages,” Brian Roberge, Bolton’s town administrator, said in an interview Tuesday. “I think we have just one road that’s not damaged at this time.”

No Bolton residents are currently stranded, Roberge said, but many of the town’s roads are closed to non-resident traffic. Roberge said he has heard of “some pretty significant property damage” in some areas of the town, but did not yet have data for how many homes were damaged.

He encouraged residents to document and report property damage from the flooding to the state , which could help secure assistance from FEMA.

“We’re still basically in what I would call the triage stage,” he said.

By Joiner Brook, Robert’s basement was drying out after filling with what she estimated to be 8 feet of water. Her hot water heater survived, but as of Monday, it wasn’t clear whether her furnace did. And water destroyed many of the items that she and her husband stored there.

“I stored Christmas decorations,” she said in an interview Monday, as workers hauled bags of belongings and trash. “There’s our winter stuff down there. Gone. It’s gone.”

Her house, where she has lived for 38 years, has no flood insurance, she said, because she was told years ago that it was not located in a flood zone.

Just yards away, workers were busy repairing a lopsided railroad trestle over the brook. Tom Ciuba, a New England Central Railroad spokesperson, said in an email that the rainfall was “quite a storm” for the railway company.

“There are resulting washouts — the largest of which is nearly 80 feet long — and other impacts along the line from roughly Montpelier Junction to Bolton, Vermont,” Ciuba said. “Our engineering team, along with experienced contractors, has been hard at work since the storm to assess and remediate the damage.”

Ciuba said that the railway is using thousands of cubic yards of fill to repair washouts along the line, which is traveled by both freight and passenger trains.

“At this point, our hope is to have the line reopened by the end of this week,” he said.

Some 1,500 feet uphill, near Bolton Valley Mountain Resort, rainwater overwhelmed culverts, destroyed a bridge and washed out roads. Bolton Valley Access Road had only one lane open as construction workers repaired the broken roadway.

At the resort itself, which offers skiing in winter and mountain biking in summer, “our work roads, our ski trails, our bike trails — so much was blown out,” Bolton Valley president and CEO Lindsay DesLauriers said in an interview Monday.

The cost for repairs was not yet clear, DesLauriers said, but would likely be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was the third weather-related incident to strike the resort in three weeks, she said. The resort had sustained damage from heavy rainfall in late June, and then a lightning storm knocked out a lift the week before the July flooding.

As the resort makes repairs, DesLauriers is working to upgrade the infrastructure to better handle severe rain events. But that is a hard and long process, she said.

“Over the last three weeks, we (were) two days a week shut down, due to rebuilding roads, fixing the lifts, you know, all that stuff,” DesLauriers said, “It’s crazy. I mean, we can’t operate like this.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: After flooding, Bolton is still in ‘triage stage’ .