When Mellissa O’Bryan awoke on July 11, the small bridge connecting her house to Ireland Road in Starksboro had disappeared. So had her car, and the road itself.
Some three weeks later, “we have no way in or out except the little walking bridge,” she said, gesturing to the foot-wide metal walkway that a friend had helped lay across the river. The adjoining road remains closed, too.
O’Bryan has been told that replacing the bridge would cost about $100,000. Since it was technically part of her driveway, she’s on the hook for paying that “unless FEMA kicks in.”
She and her husband, who are foster parents to two children, have lived in Starksboro for 24 years. “I love our community,” she said. “My kids are very involved in the school.”
As difficult as the last several weeks have been, O’Bryan said through tears, “I just have to get up and go about my day.”
The town, which she said has been “amazing” given its limited resources, created a parking spot on the other side of the river. Repair crews have been working to restore Ireland Road for three weeks, with significant work remaining.
It’s the last hurdle in restoring limited road access townwide, according to Rebecca Elder, the Starksboro town administrator. The other public roads, she said, are all at least passable.
Elder said that repair costs are hard to estimate in full, but will be “astronomical.”
The combination of materials and labor would be “absolutely” beyond the means of the town budget without outside help, she said.
Elder said she led a Federal Emergency Management Agency team around town on July 22 to show them “the human impact” of the storms.
“We know our roads hit the threshold,” she said of potential FEMA disaster coverage. “The question is on the individual level.”
O’Bryan is among those whose finances hang in the balance. “Everybody that has any amount of damage has to, has to, report it,” she said. “That’s how people get the money to fix big things.”
She also fears that the next flood will be even more catastrophic, as the riverbank erodes further and further. “All the sand and stuff that’s on this side is going to end up down in our neighbor’s lawn,” she said.
Some are less willing to stick it out.
In nearby Huntington, Amy Seoane is wrestling with the possibility of leaving Vermont.
After having been affected by floods in 2019, she and her husband, Justin Houghton, took drastic steps. They brought in materials to protect the property and elevate the garage where Houghton, an airplane mechanic, stored his equipment.
This month, 5 feet of water surged through their backyard, flooding the bottom floor of their house and causing thousands in damage. “We gotta go,” she recalled saying to her husband.
Seoane is applying for a buyout. But even if she and her husband don’t get one, they still may well leave.
Without significant changes to the local watershed to improve its resilience, she explained, she doesn’t think staying put is sustainable. Further home fortifications would be expensive, and might not work anyway.
“We need help in that river,” she said of Huntington River. “It just keeps getting worse every time.”
“It could save so many of us from wasting perfectly good homes,” said Seoane, who has already lost several neighbors in the Huntington Acres area to buyouts in the last few years.
Barbara Elliott, a former town administrator in Huntington who is overseeing much of the town’s flood recovery process, said Seoane’s was one of a number of cases where concern should be raised about the livability of the property.
A half dozen families, according to her, “should not be returning to their homes,” due to risk of further flooding, or exposure to mold and water damage. But, she said, most of them will forge on anyway.
While damage to public property had already cost “way more” than expected (town road foreman Jonathan Dennis estimated $1.2 million), Elliott is even more worried about private landowners.
“We lost a lot of agricultural land,” she said.
A mile up the road from Huntington Acres, Justin Rich spent Tuesday pulling “garbage” out of his soil. Strips of black plastic placed carefully over beds of sweet potatoes and onions to help them grow had been buried, torn, and displaced by floodwater.
Rich, who owns Burnt Rock Farm in Huntington, called the field a “zero.” All he can do now is try to prepare his fields for the next growing season.
Deposits of sand and silt covered the area, with half-grown sweet potatoes peeking up above the wreckage.
Rich and his farm manager, Hannah Aitken, were working alongside a small team that included several family members.
“It’s kind of a double whammy,” Rich said of the unexpected need for cleanup, “because it’s not like farmers tend to have extra labor kick around in the summer.”
He said he’s lost 25% of his crops this year outright, while heavy rain further affected portions of the rest. On top of that, tens of thousands of dollars in labor went into those destroyed fields.
“It’s not really possible to absorb that,” said Rich grimly. “You basically go into debt to do it again the next year.”
Even if public grants eventually cover part of the cost, it would take years to come through. He can’t afford to count on it.
And, he said, adequate insurance is almost impossible to come by. “I’m frustrated by the lack of ability to hedge our financial risk the way business needs to.”
His current coverage will insure the lost sweet potato fields for just six percent of what selling the crops would have brought in, he said. That insurance system, he said, is “not viable.”
Rich is staying put for now, but wants to get access to more land outside of the floodplains if possible.
Many farmers, he added, are “asking some pretty hard questions right now.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Barbara Elliott’s last name.
