Whenever it rains hard, Sutton Fire Chief Kyle Seymour finds himself driving around town, keeping a watchful eye on local roads and rivers.
“Thunder wakes me up now,” he said.
The floods that pummeled Vermont on July 10, 2023, caught Seymour by surprise. They were called historic at the time — until history repeated itself on the same date a year later, surprising Seymour again.
But this year, he was on guard.
“It’s no longer paranoia,” he said.
Late Thursday afternoon, heavy thunderstorms hit the state again but on a smaller scale than previous years. The impact from Thursday’s rain was largely concentrated to a handful of towns in the Northeast Kingdom and Addison County, hitting West Burke and Sutton the hardest, according to Robert Haynes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington.
“Yesterday’s events coming on the anniversary — that is a slap in the face, right? That is very hard to accept mentally,” said Doug Farnham, Vermont’s chief recovery officer, who was appointed by the governor after floods in July 2023.
People are grappling with the trauma of floods from past years, both in physical loss and in mental health effects, Farnham said. Some of the homes hit by Thursday’s floods in Sutton were also hit hard last year — and the year before, Seymour said.
The July 10 floods two years ago devastated towns across Vermont, such as Ludlow in the south all the way up to the Northeast Kingdom. Last year’s floods hit many of those same places again before they could fully recover.
“The scale and scope are certainly less compared to the last two years,” Haynes said.
In Sutton, localized rainfall washed away road surfaces and beds around town — leaving only exposed rock underneath. Calendar Brook Road, which crosses over its namesake, was especially hard hit, Seymour said.
Throughout May and the first half of June, Vermont saw much higher precipitation than average, according to Lesley-Ann L. Dupigny-Giroux, the state’s climatologist. That moisture “primed the pump” by saturating the ground just before Thursday’s rain. Similar conditions contributed to flooding in 2023 and during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, she said.
Climate change also contributes to the increased moisture in the air, later leading to higher precipitation, Dupigny-Giroux said. The changing climate also contributes to “troughs or dips in the jet stream,” she said, which can lead storms to persist over Vermont.
When asked why the event might be occurring the same time every year, meteorologist Haynes said July tends to be an apt time for hot, moist air that moves slowly. Those conditions tend to create thunderstorms that hit hard, rather than moving along, he said.
Then, locally, Vermonters feel the effects.
“We’re unfortunately getting good at this,” Seymour said. Town officials in Sutton are ready to start filling out paperwork for FEMA applications — though they just wrapped up the ones from last year, he said. Similarly, Farnham said state officials are ready to work with towns in the next steps.
“Our pencils are sharp,” he said.
