As infrastructure damage comes into focus, Vermont releases nearly $30 million in highway aid

It hasn’t been easy to get around Barnet since severe flooding struck the rural Caledonia County town this week. “I think we have, like, one road that isn’t damaged,” selectboard co-chair and road commissioner Benjamin Gates said Friday.

Plainfield has multiple roads and “a number of bridges that are completely out,” town clerk and treasurer Bram Towbin said. The drive from one end of town to the other normally takes two minutes, Towbin said. Now, it takes around 45 minutes, he said.

In Moretown, meanwhile, the surging Mad River caused a bridge on Route 100B to buckle and crack and caused extensive damage to roads, selectboard chair Tom Martin said Thursday. Flooding a year ago caused roughly $1.5 million worth of road damage, Martin said, “And we’re going to certainly eclipse that this year.”

As floodwaters continued to recede Friday, state and local officials across northern and central Vermont were getting a clearer picture of the impact on infrastructure — which has been, in some areas, worse than the damage wreaked by last July’s historic floods.

As of Friday, 18 state-owned roads were still closed — down from 54 on Thursday, Vermont Transportation Secretary Joe Flynn said at a press conference Friday . Those 18 closed roads include eight state-owned bridges, he said.

But those figures do not include miles and miles of town and private roads, many of which sustained significant damage — particularly if they were unpaved.

Martin, the Moretown selectboard chair, estimated Thursday that hundreds of residents of his town were stranded in their homes after dirt roads washed out.

In Barton, town clerk Kristin Atwood said that the damage to roads was worse than that seen in 2023’s floods.

“The dirt roads in the town — a lot is just missing, and it’s taking longer to do the repairs because we need more stone to fill them,” Atwood said. “These gaping wounds in the roads are 8, 10 feet deep in places, and that takes a lot of material.”

In Hinesburg, where some residents with rain gauges clocked ten inches of rain, floodwaters washed out roads to roughly 20 households, according to town manager Todd Odit.

“A lot of the gravel roads in our hill section saw some pretty massive devastation, total loss of road,” Odit said. “And we have a lot of people on private roads who’ve lost their road completely.”

It was, he said, “the worst damage I have ever seen in Hinesburg.”

The Vermont Agency of Transportation is releasing $29.5 million in town highway aid early, Flynn announced Friday. The money, appropriated in Vermont’s annual transportation budget, was originally supposed to be disbursed over six months, but will now be paid out by early August, Flynn said. The state will start paying out the first chunk of money — $14 million — by early next week.

Eight sections of railroad, served by Amtrak and freight lines, were also closed as of Friday. Amtrak’s Vermonter passenger train, which runs between St. Albans and Washington, D.C., is not running, Flynn said Friday.

A segment of rail line between Middlebury and Burlington is also closed, which is impacting the Ethan Allen Express between Burlington and New York City. Passengers can take a connecting bus between Burlington and Middlebury, however, and “Vermont Rail Systems reports they believe that this will be a fairly quick fix,” Flynn said.

Most of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail is still open. Sections between Swanton to Cambridge Junction, St. Johnsbury to Danville, and Walden Heights to Hardwick Depot are all accessible, Flynn said. But other sections sustained damage, including “a fairly significant spot that has been destroyed” in West Danville, he said.

By Friday, power had been restored to nearly all flood-impacted Vermonters. According to VTOutages and Green Mountain Power, only 14 Green Mountain Power customers, in Barnet, were still without electricity due to the impact of flooding as of Friday afternoon.

Those customers were expected to regain power imminently, Green Mountain Power spokesperson Kristin Carlson said.

“We serve three-quarters of the state of Vermont, which is very rural service territory, which is remote dirt roads,” Carlson said. “And a large majority of our customers live in these remote areas, and any outages that were being restored today were in those areas where it was tough to gain access to, because of the severe weather and the damage that came from it.”

As of Friday afternoon, 48 households served by the Washington Electric Co-op were still without power, according to general manager Louis Porter.

The cooperative expects to restore power to 18 of those households by Friday night, Porter said, but the remaining customers will likely have to wait until over the weekend. The co-op is still working to restore power to hard-hit areas in Plainfield, Fayston and Middlesex, he said.

One area of the state’s infrastructure appears to have fared relatively well. Amid the flooding, Vermont’s dams have thus far seemed to hold strong, Neil Kamman, the director of the state’s water investment division, said in an interview Friday.

“It appears to be a much better situation than last year,” Kamman said, referring to the challenges Vermont dams faced after last July’s flooding.

The state’s three Winooski River flood control dams — Waterbury, Wrightsville and East Barre — all performed well during the rainfall, Kamman said, and had plenty of water capacity.

Out of an abundance of caution, a state dam engineer, Ben Green, slept in his car at Waterbury Dam Wednesday night so he could release water in case of an emergency — something that he did during last year’s flooding, as well.

That emergency did not come to pass. Officials were aware of no significant damage to any dam, Kamman said. In fact, initial reports of a breach of a dam at Harvey’s Lake in Barnet were incorrect: The dam overtopped but was not damaged, state officials said.

Still, as communities dig out and tally up the damage, the bill for infrastructure damage is likely to be hefty.

“I don’t have a ton of history with estimates in this area,” Brian Roberge, Bolton’s town administrator, said when asked for the cost of repairs to town roads. “But I would say, you know, it’s going to start with M’s.”

Emma Cotton and Kristen Fountain contributed reporting.

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