Flooding shapes debate over climate policies

By MAURY THOMPSON
Contributing writer

 

Last month’s severe floods in Vermont and New York will have long-term public policy implications in areas ranging from infrastructure and community planning to environmental and insurance rules, government officials and advocates say.

“Make no mistake, the devastation and flooding we are experiencing across Vermont is historic and catastrophic,” Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, said at a press conference on July 13, three days after a band of sustained downpours sent floodwaters surging into downtown Montpelier and a string of other towns spanning much of the center of the state from north to south.

By month’s end, Vermont had documented flood damage to more than 4,000 homes statewide, including at least 750 that were no longer habitable, and hundreds of businesses. Some of the hardest hit towns were those just to the east of Bennington and Rutland counties — including Bridgewater, Ludlow, Weston, Londonderry, Jamaica and Wardsboro. There also was damage locally in Mount Holly, East Wallingford and in other locations, including along the Otter Creek in Center Rutland.

While the recovery is under way, some say this summer’s extreme weather should underscore the urgency of doing more to adapt to climate change. Scientists have predicted that a warming climate will produce more humid conditions — and more extreme precipitation events — across the Northeast.

“This is possibly our new normal,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said at a press conference July 16, amid the cleanup from sustained heavy downpours that dumped as much as 10 inches of rain in just a few hours in Highland Falls and several neighboring towns in the lower Hudson Valley, damaging about 1,000 homes and businesses. By late July, at least three deaths in the two states had been attributed to the storms.

 

Wider range of issues
Lawmakers in both Vermont and New York have already set a series of ambitious goals and policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years to combat climate change, mainly by pushing the increased use of electric vehicles and home heating systems to replace those powered by fossil fuels.

In May, for example, legislative Democrats in Vermont overrode Scott’s veto to enact a new “clean heat” law designed to shift the state away from the use of fossil fuels for home heating while supporting the use of electric heat pumps, biofuels, pellet stoves and increased weatherization.

Similarly, New York lawmakers passed a new state budget provision this spring that bans the use of natural gas and oil in new buildings by the end of the decade. Another provision of the new budget directs the state Power Authority to produce all of its electricity from renewable energy sources and phase out its use of fossil fuels by 2030.

Now, this summer’s floods could expand the field of policy debates to land-use patterns and ways to make housing, transportation and other infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather, several area elected officials and advocated predicted in telephone interviews last month.
“I hope this will speed along some things,” said Glens Falls 3rd Ward Supervisor Claudia Braymer, a Democrat who chairs the Environmental Committee of the Warren County Board of Supervisors.

Braymer, a lawyer and deputy director of the environmental group Protect the Adirondacks, said the flood damage should serve as a call to action.

“I think it’s a really critical issue that we need to get some consensus around — maybe not from the reasons for climate change, but from the perspective that these things are now happening more often and we need to get our hands around them and address them,” she said.

 

Republican skeptics
Consensus might be a tall order, given the polarized national political environment. Many Republican officials in Vermont and New York remain skeptical of climate change and predictions of its effects — and of the policies the two states’ heavily Democratic legislatures have enacted to deal with the issue.

David Catalfamo, a Republican economic development consultant from Saratoga County who mounted an unsuccessful bid for a state Assembly seat last year, said he doesn’t see this year’s floods changing the political divisions over climate change or spurring a push for new policies.
“There seems to be a debate on if these weather patterns are something that is permanent or not,” Catalfamo said. “I don’t sense any sort of cohesion around anything new.”

But Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner, D-Round Lake, the four-term incumbent who defeated Catalfamo last year, said the important thing is to acknowledge that the region’s weather patterns are changing, regardless of the details of one’s theory about climate change.

“My first thought is rather than have a debate, let’s look at the trends,” Woerner said. “And we are seeing hotter temperatures and stronger storms.”

July’s floods have clear implications for land-use policy, Woerner said. It is now more important to preserve wetlands as buffer areas to help absorb runoff from storms, she said, and the state should discourage construction on steep slopes that are susceptible to mudslides.

Scott, the Vermont governor, said the storm that began July 9 was the worst in his state since the remnants of Hurricane Irene dumped as much as 11 inches of rain across Vermont in 2011, causing $733 million in damage. This year’s disaster seemed worse, he said.

“Irene had about a 12-hour duration of rain, and then it was over: The sun came up, everyone went out,” he said. “This is different. We’ve had like 48 hours of steady rain, that same intense rain we saw in Irene.”

One challenge was that, when the most intense rainfall bore down on the region beginning July 9, the ground across much of Vermont and New York was already saturated from a series of storms over the preceding weeks.

In Montpelier, for example, National Weather Service statistics show more than 6 inches of rain fell July 10-11 in the storm that sent the Winooski River over its banks. But from June 1 through July 29, a total of 16.7 inches of rain fell in Montpelier — more than double the normal 8.2 inches for the period.

 

Building better infrastructure
Several government officials and policy experts suggested the biggest long-term policy impact of this summer’s floods will be on infrastructure.

Mike Elmendorf, president and chief executive officer of Associated General Contractors of New York, a trade group, said it’s important to design highways and bridges with the change in weather patterns in mind.

“They’re not 100-year storms any more — or whatever the term is that we may use,” he said. “We need to build along the concept that you have resiliency.”

In New York, floodwaters washed out the tracks on the main rail line between Manhattan and Albany, halting train service for more than two days, and the storms damaged Route 9W, the Palisades Interstate Parkway and numerous local roads.

In Vermont, in a situation reminiscent of Irene’s devastation, damage from this year’s floods briefly blocked nearly all of the state’s east-west highways north of Bennington and Brattleboro. But most reopened within a few days, and overall highway damage in Vermont appeared to be much less severe than in 2011.

“I’m not seeing the number of bridge failures that we had with Irene,” Scott said. “I think a lot of it is going to be in the communities, in the storefronts, in the downtowns, that are going to be impacted the most.”

Lyle Jepson, executive director of Chamber & Economic Development of the Rutland Region, said that in the coming months, engineers will be assessing just how frequently storms of this intensity might occur — and recommending ways to improve resiliency of the region’s roads.
“That would include looking at simple things — like culverts and the amount of stone used in construction,” he said.

Elmendorf said the flood damage will stretch budgets for infrastructure, particularly given that highway construction costs have risen sharply in the past two years because of inflation and supply shortages.

“Two weeks ago that road that needed to be repaired -- now it needs to be replaced,” he said.
The recent damage could rearrange priorities for projects to be funded through the five-year infrastructure bill that President Biden signed into law last year.

“You may run out of money before you run out of projects,” Elmendorf said.

 

Helping homeowners and farmers
As of late July, a major disaster declaration by the federal government covered nine of Vermont’s 14 counties, including Rutland, Windsor and Windham, providing critical emergency funding through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery and reconstruction efforts.
President Biden also approved a separate disaster declaration covering eight counties in New York, including Dutchess, Putnam, Orange and Rockland in the Hudson Valley as well as Clinton, Essex and Hamilton in the Adirondacks.

Hochul, the New York governor, said the state needs a policy discussion about how to make it easier for property owners to buy flood insurance now that storms and flooding are becoming more common and more widespread.

“Homeowners are not prepared,” she said. “They don’t have the money in their pockets and bank accounts.”

In Vermont, agriculture is another area of concern. Scott predicted in a July 14 press release that losses will be catastrophic for many of the state’s farmers.

“Much of our most fertile farmland lies in river valleys, and countless fields of corn, hay, vegetables, fruit and pasture were swamped and buried,” the governor said. “We expect that the excessive flooding and related silt and other contamination will destroy large shares of our produce and livestock feed.”

Steve Ammerman, a spokesman for the New York Farm Bureau, said no significant crop damage was reported in New York.