‘I’m still in shock’: Plainfield residents start to dig out

PLAINFIELD — Walker Blackwell and Christiana Athena-Blackwell moved into their Hudson Avenue home with their newborn baby two days before last summer’s flooding began. River water filled their basement, destroying treasured books and records. When the water came this time, it was even worse.

On Wednesday evening, Athena-Blackwell was eating dinner at home with her mother and her baby when the nearby Great Brook cleared its banks. Debris quickly accumulated against the Mill Street bridge, sending flood waters rushing over the area and ultimately destroying the bridge.

“We heard this crash, bang,” she said. Athena-Blackwell quickly rushed with her mother, child and dog into the car and drove east up Hudson Avenue. They escaped seconds before water began rushing over the road, she said.

Under a light drizzle on Friday, the family, like many of their Plainfield neighbors, worked to dig themselves out.

Four-hundred Plainfield residents were still without basic services such as water or electricity as of Friday afternoon, according to the town’s emergency management director, Michael Billingsley. Forty families have been seriously impacted, and at least 20 people have had to be evacuated to nearby shelters and other locations, he said.

“Nobody was expecting this,” said Adrian Bradley, who flew in Friday morning from California to help his parents, Owen and Jane, dig out and assess the damage. “We’ve had flooding, but this has never happened. It’s never been this bad.”

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Silt and mud caked Hudson Avenue — an area that Billingsley likened to a “war zone.” Residents shoveled dirt and hauled debris. Near where the Heartbreak Hotel apartment complex had stood only days ago, a fire burned with wood collected from the destroyed building.

While the Winooski River didn’t rise to dangerous levels this time around, the Great Brook caused substantial damage. A powerful surge of water came down, and as trees and debris dammed up near the bridges, floodwaters rushed over the banks, knocking out the bridge, which then knocked out the support beams to the Heartbreak Hotel.

With less than 10-minutes warning, the people living in the building’s five apartment units had to evacuate.

“Many pets were lost, I think,” Billingsley said. “Because they didn’t have time to get back to collect their cats and dogs.”

The flooding damage surpassed that of last summer “by a great deal,” Billingsley said. The town on Friday was still assessing the extent of the damage.

“We don’t know everything we need to know,” he said. The full extent of the structural damage to the town’s southern end along Brooks Road, for example, remains unclear.

Meanwhile, the town garage, located on Cameron Road, remains inaccessible, preventing the road crew from accessing its dump trucks and backhoes.

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The Vermont Agency of Transportation is working to reopen Brooks Road, Billingsley said. Green Mountain Power is working to disconnect electricity to areas with downed lines or where poles have been washed out.

As crews work on Brooks Road, Billingsley said he’s made a request for the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a bridge to connect Mills Street.

Billingsley said that many of the retaining walls along the Great Brook, installed by engineers more than a century ago with 1,500 blocks of stone, appear to be destroyed.

“It’s all gone now,” he said. “This flood took it out, and that’s a 150-year-old structure. It’s been through the 1927 flood. It’s been through really severe weather of kinds that really wasn’t well recorded in the past… they’re gone.”

Frustrations mounted for some. Jerry Kirk, a Plainfield resident for eight years and a Vermont resident for 33, sat outside his Main Street home under a tent — a makeshift coordination hub for volunteers heading into town to help.

Kirk was “fed up,” he said, “with the failure of the state to deal with this flooding problem” over the last century.

“The state’s known about this problem since 1927,” he said. “Their inaction is killing people. … It’s not going to stop.”

The nearby town of Marshfield suffered minimal damage, according to Assistant Town Clerk Alexandra Johnson: a couple of road washouts but no reports of damage to homes.

“I think the work that our road crew did from last year’s floods has really reflected on how the roads held up,” she said.

Up the road in Cabot, Selectboard Chair Mike Hogan said that the town, overall, did “pretty well” in comparison to last July’s flooding. Several roads are closed and many others sustained damage, he said, adding that some residents had spent sleepless nights pumping water out of their basements. However, the town saw nothing like the havoc wreaked on its downtown area last year .

“We’re still here, and we’re thankful,” Hogan said.

Cabot will still be holding a planned street festival on Saturday afternoon to commemorate last year’s flood and celebrate the community’s resilience.

K. Fiegenbaum contributed reporting.

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