WESTMINSTER WEST — Residents living in the valley along Westminster West Road may have thought they were “singled out for the Rapture,” as one local resident put it, when a localized thunderstorm dropped 4.25 inches of rain in an hour on Friday night, causing flash flooding along Hartley Hill, Hitchcock, and Bemis Hill roads.
Hardest hit was Bemis Hill Road, which was completely washed out along its length.
“We just finished getting a one-lane road open on Bemis Hill Road after Friday's deluge with the help of a few local contractors and an extra few 10-wheelers,” Assistant Road Foreman Reed Webster posted on Facebook on Sunday afternoon.
“Proceed with caution as there are 6-foot ditches here and there,” he warned.
Footage that Webster filmed on his cell phone is available at on.fb.me/m23bG5.
Westminster Town Manager Sonia Alexander said that as of Monday morning, all roads in Westminster West were passable, and that Bemis Hill Road will eventually be rebuilt.
State officials were on hand Monday to do damage assessments.
Joe Ruzzo, general maintenance manager from the Vermont Agency of Transportation's District 2 office in Dummerston, said he did the initial assessment to the Bemis Hill and Hartley Hill roadways.
This is the first step in seeing if Westminster and Rockingham meet the threshold of damage to qualify for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
The next step is to have FEMA officials inspect the infrastructure, which they are scheduled to do this week, to assess the actual damage to roads and bridges.
According to Russ Nagy, the deputy director of Vermont Emergency Management, Windham County likely qualifies for further assessment by FEMA, as the threshold is measured in a dollar amount per capita, by population.
Windham County's threshold is $144,000, a number that was likely reached in just a portion of Bemis Hill Road, or even Hartley Hill or Kimball Hill roads, in Westminster, he said.
Individual assessment by FEMA officials of damage to homes and property will follow after that in a separate assessment.
Anyone whose property was affected by the localized rain storm that caused flash floods last week in Athens, Windham, Westminster, and Rockingham are urged to call 211, the state assistance number, to get the ball rolling for assistance in dealing with the damage.
Nagy said the total numbers and paperwork should be in over the next couple of weeks, but was reluctant to specify a time.
“It takes as long as it takes,” he said.
Sue Minton, of Gov. Peter Shumlin's office, said that the Governor intends to wait until the flood waters from Lake Champlain have receded to determine the full extent of the damage to the northern eight counties involved in flooding at the end of April and in May, before sending the letter requesting FEMA assistance aid to President Obama to rebuild private property and the state's effected infrastructure.
Windham County will likely be included in that request, according to Nagy.
Scenes of destruction
Bemis Hill Road resident Gaelen Ewald, who hiked to the top of the road on Saturday morning, reported that neither of the two ponds at the top of the road had given way.
“They both overflowed, but they didn't give way,” she said.
General contractor Charles Lovell, who was running the backhoe replacing rocks for the roadbed, said the culverts were all washed out the length of the road and would be replaced.
Indeed, one of the metal culverts that ran beneath the road could be seen in the stream, bent in half from the force of the water that still raged alongside the roadbed.
Road crews were out until 1:30 a.m. early Saturday, then back again at 7 a.m., to repair the roads, said Westminster Road Foreman Mark Lund.
Hartley Hill Road was passable on Saturday morning, but had huge swaths cut along the ditches, and new paths cut from the roadway down to the embankments of the stream that runs alongside the road.
Webster directed town trucks as they dumped rocks to shore up one of the cuts.
“This [storm] just seemed to stay and circle over this part of the valley,” Webster said, noting that in Westminster and Bellows Falls, rains were light or non-existent.
Barbara Pacific, waitress at the Dish on Main in Saxtons River said, “The old timers who came in this morning said this was the worst storm they can remember.”
“It's hydrology,” said meteorologist Peter Banacos of the National Weather Service's Burlington office. “We've been getting a very persistent wet pattern. How is the rain going to get absorbed? The storm had a very small footprint with a heavy amount of rain in a short time, which causes flash flooding. Water is going to find any way it can off the hillsides, and the culverts can't handle that amount of water.”
Richard Ewald, who lives with his wife at the bottom of Bemis Hill Road, the hardest hit of the roads, stood at the bottom of his drive on Saturday morning.
He looked up the hill, where a river of water had deposited stones by the thousands, most of them twice the size of a softball, where his garlic was planted. The stones stood starkly against the green growth flattened beneath the stones, all running in the direction of the flood downhill.
His neighbor from across the road, Royal Hutchinson, spoke to a contractor about how he's going to clean up the deposit of sand several inches deep on his driveway. Deposits of gravel and sand almost a foot deep were cleared off Westminster Road Friday night, twice, just above his house in the path of the flash flood.
“What you can see is just a small portion what the flood left,” he said.
His house and property sat right in the path of the deluge.
“He was lucky,” said Ewald. “The river of water split when it hit the road, and went to either side of his house.”
Hutchinson may not see it that way, however, as he still got several inches of water in his basement, which “may have affected the pylons” his house is built on. He said he may consider legal action, so he “can't say much” right now.
Ewald said, “It's going to take a while to sort things out.”
On Hartley Hill Road, across the line in Rockingham, homeowner Jim Hood gestured to the evidence of the flood that washed directly into his yard, from across the road and up the hill.
“I was in Alstead at a Little League game when I got the call,” he said. “I was told, 'You got water coming down your drive into the house.'”
Hood found water in the basement but none in the house, which sat about a foot above the flood. But he noted that the culvert causing the problems “has been an issue for years” with the town of Rockingham, and pointed across the field beside his house.
“That keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.” A cavernous 20-foot-wide ditch just below the culvert cuts the field in half. “Before they put the culvert in, I used to mow right across that field. I'm losing land every year.”
Until people talk to their insurance agencies, and get the damage assessed, the cost to property owners is unknown, as is the cost to the towns of Westminster and Rockingham.