After the Storm

Thursday, July 9, 2026

This morning, I crossed from my home on Elm Street to gaze at the north branch of the Winooski River. The water flows; gentle and unhurried. Sunlight filters through the trees, casting shifting shadows and reflections across its surface. It is accompanied by the familiar chorus of summer birdsong. I do not know their names, but I recognize their chatter and enjoy it while I can, before the less welcome sound of rubber on asphalt drowns it out.

A river can keep many a story concealed within its flow, and as I view the spire of the nearby Unitarian church, I am confident that the church has borne witness to countless whispered prayers within its pews.

The casual visitor to our city on a morning such as this would be forgiven for believing they had discovered one of New England’s gentler corners.

For many Americans, Vermont is almost synonymous with The Fall.

And yet, as a summer morning like this drifts towards autumn, visitors would still find it hard to imagine that, in just a few short weeks, this same river, church, and my home will lie beneath snow, with temperatures falling to 20 or 30 degrees below zero. The river will become a solid white sidewalk running through the downtown area.

It would be harder still to believe that three years ago today, standing where I placed myself this morning, they would have found themselves submerged, as this same river broke its banks and rose to change the lives of so many hundreds of people, including my own.

Before reading further, I’d invite you to spend three minutes watching the short film below. I made it shortly after the event, partly as a record for myself, and partly as a thank you to everyone who helped our community recover. Looking back, perhaps it captured far more than I understood at the time.

Filmed by Steve Scrivens, edited by my son; Tom Scrivens. Music - After the Storm - Mumford & Sons.

An Ordinary Monday

It was a normal Monday morning in July. That is to say, it was summer and it was raining.

As a Brit living in Vermont these last nine years, I found it mildly amusing to hear local folk greet one another, including myself, with the refrain, “Good morning, raining again, must be in Vermont.”

The proverbial boot was now firmly on the other foot, as Vermonters recognized that, like the UK, Vermont got its fair share of the wet stuff.

We’re not talking April showers either. June of 2023 felt like it had rained every day since the month started. Whatever the folklore or my fading memory says about it, records do show that by July 8th, 2023, soil moisture across the spine of the Green Mountains was above the 98th percentile.

Things were not about to get better.

I prepared for my day in much the same way as I normally did. Coffee, a couple of croissants with lots of Irish butter and blueberry jam, shower, scanned my schedule and loaded the day’s routes into my GPS, a habit I’d developed after discovering that mobile signal in rural Vermont could never be taken for granted.

My cleaner arrived to prepare my home and the guest room for that evening’s Airbnb arrivals. We chatted about the seemingly endless rain and Billie-Jo said that the properties across the road were already having problems pumping out water from their basements. This was nothing out of the ordinary. The Winooski often runs high, and the houses opposite sat six or seven feet lower than my home.

Please stand by for an important announcement from VT-Alert.

As I left home for the first airport transfer of the day, VT-Alert was reiterating the flood watch, something I’d heard many times over the years. My sister and brother-in-law were concerned, but there was nothing in the alert that particularly worried me, and I felt comfortable getting on with my day.

It wasn’t a fun drive, to be sure, but after nine Vermont winters, I’d handled pretty much everything the weather could throw at me. I felt equipped to handle anything but fate.

The airport transfer trips were uneventful, and the rain had abated by the time I pulled into the parking lot of my local Shaw’s supermarket. I was looking forward to a nice steak and a bottle of Merlot and planned to keep an eye on the local TV news to keep me informed of how the river levels were doing.

The main branch of the Winooski River which ran alongside the supermarket had risen considerably since I left the city earlier that day and it was flowing angrily and fast, but traffic was flowing normally as I drove down Main Street towards my home.

Turning left on to School Street I crossed a bridge over the North Branch of the River and prepared to turn right on to Elm at which point a Montpelier Police Cruiser crossed my path and blocked the road. I was confused. This sort of police activity was out of character for our tranquil city. The officer told me that I could go no further because the road was impassable. Impassable? I couldn’t imagine why…I was not connecting the dots. And then I saw.

Elm Street was now a river. I told the officer I lived just a few doors up the street and wondered if I might be allowed to drive or wade through the water to get some things from my home and maybe take some of my beloved books upstairs just in case things did turn for the worse. He pointed down the street to people evacuating the area on foot who were already waist deep. I hadn’t realised until that moment quite how much the land undulated.

As I looked up the street it occurred to me how lucky my good friend Miguel had been. He had arranged to park his vehicle opposite my home while I would take him to the airport to fly home and spend time with his family. On a whim, he decided to spare me the 4am ride and drove himself to the airport and used their parking garage instead. But for that decision, he would have lost his truck.

In the days that followed I would be reminded again and again that this event would be shaped by chance with moments of good fortune and bad.

The VT-Alerts had begun as a familiar Flood Watch, something Vermonters saw from time to time. By mid-afternoon the warnings had become more urgent, but even then, I had little sense about what was about to unfold. The official concern the previous day had been flash flooding, not that downtown Montpelier itself would be overwhelmed.

By the time I turned on to Elm Street, flooding was already occurring. As I reflect on the events as they unfolded it seems clear that forecasts underestimated the scale of what was happening and while warnings increased in severity as new information arrived, the flood was accelerating faster than the forecasts. Mother Nature wasn’t waiting for the next alert.

I stood with my neighbours and learned of people desperate to get into their homes to rescue their pets and heard for the first time of the concerns that the nearby Wrightsville Dam might be breached or even fail.

Rumours are a notoriously poor relation to facts, but they fill a void in the absence of reliable information. The Wrightsville Dam, built after the great flood of 1927, was designed to reduce the amount of water flowing into the North Branch of the Winooski River. It’s a little over three miles upstream of my home.

I drove away rather bewildered with a growing sense of concern that things were not looking good for my home and all the while wondering how fast 6.6 billion gallons of water would flow from a failed dam. It was surreal to begin sensing that I might be living on the edge of a disaster movie. I didn’t know whether to believe it, but I couldn’t ignore it either.

My sister lives in nearby Stowe and she suggested I drive over to stay the night with them. Normally I’d have reached her by taking interstate 89 north before leaving at Exit 10. I checked my GPS. The northbound Interstate between Exit 7 and Exit 9 was already closed. Under normal circumstances, I would simply have driven west along Route 2 to Waterbury before turning north towards Stowe, following first the Winooski River and then the Little River. But I had no idea what condition those roads were in, or what the rivers beside them looked like beyond the next bend. I decided not to risk it.

I drove away down Main Street crossing the bridge over the main section of the Winooski River and for the first time I noticed significant items of debris; branches, boughs and whole trees. At times, I have wondered whether I also saw a car in the torrent. Memory has a habit of borrowing images from elsewhere and as I sit here today after three years, I’m no longer certain.

I had driven to the gas station to pick up some provisions for the evening ahead. I have no clear memory of what I bought but I do remember filling up the tank with gas despite having no plans to travel.

Around 8 p.m. I received a call-back from my Air BnB guests who were booked in to my home for the next couple of nights. They were traveling from Boston on a Greyhound bus and were already on their way. I’d been trying to reach them to explain what was happening. I have no idea why the Greyhound had not been canceled. Interstate 89 had already closed between Exits 7 and 9, and as far as I could tell, there was no way of getting into the city from that route. Perhaps the world outside of Vermont was not yet aware of what was unfolding. I considered canceling other bookings for the month but still felt that might be unnecessarily preemptive.

Later, as the evening wore on, I called one of my neighbours to check in on them. They had been stranded in their home as the river had risen too quickly for them to evacuate. The water had risen to the level of the porch. We shared a sloping driveway, and their car was parked at the top end. I normally parked behind their car. Had I arrived home earlier, my vehicle would by now be at least fifty percent submerged and my livelihood, at least temporarily, threatened.

At this point there was no plan, so I decided to wait things out on the forecourt of the gas station which had now closed. There was no traffic, just the relentless sound of heavy rain pounding the windshield and roof of my car. I managed some fitful sleep and woke in the early hours of the morning. I could hear the roar of the river as it sped through and was relieved to note that at least on this side of the river, there had been no breach. I wondered how long that might remain the case and started to think whether I needed to be on higher ground until the morning.

I opened the traffic map on my phone.

There was no way in or out.

Part Two continues with the dawn of July 11, 2023