Stowe homes get hammered by back-to-back storms

This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in the Stowe Reporter on June 18.

Kyle DeLucia and his family were out of town on June 23 when as much as 3 inches of rain fell on Stowe Hollow in 30 minutes, and they rushed back to find their home had been knocked off its foundation.

Last week, it happened again.

“This was a one-two punch for us,” DeLucia said.

DeLucia and his family live at 6 North Hollow Road, the first home on the rural dirt byway, right next to the intersection with Upper Hollow Road. The house was built in 1900. It will be at least partly rebuilt in 2024.

While much of the attention with the twin storms that rocked Stowe in the past three weeks — an isolated cell on June 23 and the much larger remnants of Hurricane Beryl on July 10-11 — has been on public infrastructure and the race to re-open roads and bridges , the storms also damaged innumerable homes and other private properties.

The public and the private are connected. DeLucia thinks the first flood was exacerbated by culverts upstream of the nearby Gold Brook that were installed decades before climate change rendered phrases like “100-year storms” obsolete.

In the first storm, DeLucia learned, the rapidly rising water overwhelmed the culverts above his house and Gold Brook simply adopted North Hollow Road as a temporary tributary. The water rushed to the side of the house, and the force blew the foundation out, filling the basement with mud all the way to the ceiling.

“I have a one-and-a-half-year-old, and my wife’s pregnant with our second on the way, and to walk in and see my son’s toys floating in the mud, I mean, that’s some of the most heart-wrenching stuff that I’ve experienced in terms of natural disaster,” he said. “It’s hard to walk in and see that.”

He had to put the house on cribbing and stilts and find a contractor to replace the foundation and remove the silt and mud from the yard. In the middle of all that, Hurricane Beryl slowly swept in and undid much of the repair work that town crews and folks from Dale Percy, Inc., had been performing.

“So, here we go, storm number two, and it all washed down again,” DeLucia said. “Of course, now I’ve got no foundation and a hole in the ground, so everything just filled right back in.”

In something of a silver lining to the seemingly never-ending rain clouds, DeLucia has been moved by the actions of his neighbors. He said several people, some of whom he had never met before, simply showed up with snow shovels and began scooping mud out of the house.

“The outpouring of support from the community has been nothing that I could have ever imagined or dreamed of,” DeLucia said.

At what cost?

In Nebraska Valley, Dave Hatoff awoke last Thursday to find a good-sized rainbow trout lying dead in the driveway, scales glinting in the sun. The hapless fish likely came from the Lake Mansfield Trout Club, just up the road, swept up in the Miller Brook, which flows right behind — and often through — Hatoff’s property.

Hatoff has become accustomed to the brook getting into his home. At least he has since 2011.

That’s when Tropical Storm Irene — until last year, the worst Vermont storm in recent memory — flooded much of the state. Before Irene, the last Hatoff’s home got completely flooded was in 1976, when the Trout Club dam broke.

Starting in 2011, it’s become something of a regular occurrence.

“Since Irene came, the area where I live has become a major flood zone,” Hatoff said. “So now, I have to take out a lot of money every year and pay for flood insurance. It’s now mandatory.”

Typically, even minor flooding fills up, or at least dampens, his home’s crawl space. Last week, it took out his entire driveway, with the water reaching halfway up his car’s wheels.

Like DeLucia, Hatoff discovered the road itself became one with the river.

He said this is now the fourth time in 12 months his home has flooded — last week, June 23, last December and last July .

Hatoff likes where he lives and doesn’t intend on moving any time soon, but he wonders if he would have moved there 20-something years ago if he’d known the out-of-the-way area would become a major flood zone.

“I love the river. I have a lot of respect for the river and realize there’s a give and take for the river,” he said. “But now, if I had to look back at buying a house on a river, I probably wouldn’t do it.”

Further up in the Hollow from the DeLucias, Richard Esposito and the four families who live on Farrell Farm Lane found themselves having to fix the same culverts that they fixed the year before. They had to do it out of pocket, too.

Esposito said last year, the damage set them back $26,000. This year it was $24,000. He said luckily all the neighbors split the cost.

“It would have put a dent in my savings for sure,” he said. “I’d be back to peanut butter and jelly like when I was 21 and just starting off.”

After the June 23 flooding, Stowe public works director Harry Shepard was worried that the storm was so isolated that the town might not qualify for federal disaster relief. With last year’s storm hitting the entire upper third of the state, that’s not a worry, at least for the public infrastructure.

“Frankly, I’m hoping that there’s something for private assistance, too, because that’s always a difficult situation for us when we see the public damage but we’re abutting the private damage,” Shepard said. “This one’s been very impactful to private individuals and properties and downgradient situations.”

Federal aid would come in handy for folks like the DeLucias, too. He said his homeowner insurance doesn’t cover groundwater, and he was told “we have zero coverage whatsoever” for the double whammy, and the family never foresaw needing flood insurance in a mountain town.

“I’m looking into getting it in the future, after this experience, but flood insurance was never anything that we discussed and it was never brought to my attention,” he said.

Editor’s note: David Hatoff is a Stowe Reporter employee.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Stowe homes get hammered by back-to-back storms .