SOUTH WALDEN – Lydia Race remembers the creeping feeling of defeat as she watched rain overpower the newly built culverts in her driveway the night of July 10.
“You gotta be kidding me,” was all she could think to herself.
Water ran “like a faucet” back into her garage, flooding her basement for the third time in a year.
Lydia Race stands in front of her South Walden home on Tuesday, July 9, as three days of rain began that flooded her basement for the third time, even after KURRVE arranged for help from United Methodist Church volunteers who installed improved driveway drainage.
Just three weeks before, volunteers from the United Methodist Committee on Relief had finished putting in drainage around her house in South Walden. She said the rain July 10 and over the following days made all their work virtually obsolete.
The next day, July 11, a volunteer with the church committee told her to call 211 and report the damages to her home.
When Race called, she was told someone would contact her in the following days, she said. In the meantime, the 70-year-old figured she should start mucking out her basement herself. She said she has chronic breathing problems that make it hard to work in the moldy environment.
It has been almost two weeks, and she said she still hasn’t received a call back.
Race is one of many Vermonters who once again need immediate disaster relief while still recovering from last year’s floods. Long-term flood recovery groups have also been set back, said Misty Grassley, the community coordinator at Kingdom United Resilience and Recovery Effort, the local group known as KURRVE.
Lydia Race points to an area in her garage where water leaks in from the road, noting it’s already beginning to get wet on Tuesday, July 9, even before heavier rain fell on July 10 and early July 11.
KURRVE serves the Northeast Kingdom’s 55 municipalities. The organization was set up at the recommendation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after last year’s catastrophic summer flooding, Grassley said. The idea, she said, is to continue helping people past initial disaster recovery operations.
“When a disaster happens, you have response, relief and recovery,” she said. “So we’re sort of the last people that physically go in.”
However, Grassley said that the group is currently in “response mode,” as it tries to coordinate help for the over 2,000 survivors in the Kingdom who contacted 211. In some cases, Grassley said that includes members of KURRVE on location to help people clean out their homes.
Grassley said last summer the group’s work usually began after people had applied for FEMA relief funds. The group can help with the application process or guide people on how to appeal rejected applications, and it connects people with disaster case managers or with aid agencies.
It was KURRVE that connected Race with the United Methodist Church volunteers who came to her house at the start of this summer. Two crews helped her: one from Pennsylvania, the other from West Virginia, she said. Along with digging new culverts and installing a drainage pipe off the side of her driveway, they cleaned and redid some of the corroded walls of her basement, she said.
Though Race was grateful for the work, she said it didn’t do enough to mitigate the water that eventually re-flooded her basement early this month. She said she hasn’t been in contact with KURRVE since then.
The Kingdom group was just starting its work of helping people such as Race recover from last July’s disaster when parts of Vermont flooded again this month, said group treasurer Denis Houle.
Grassley said the organization’s $1 million fundraising goal from last summer has gone up to an estimated $2.5 million. It’s too soon to tell how many more houses to repair will be added to the group’s list of 82 homes, she said, but the number is sure to rise.
Before the most recent floods, the group’s funds from grants and donations added up to $147,000, about two-thirds of which came via the Vermont Community Foundation last December.
Houle said that is a significant amount of money, but it can be used up quickly “considering that some of the price tags on these projects are $30,000, $40,000, $50,000.”
Grassley said the group is trying to get a grasp on the scope of this month’s damages. There’s no guarantee people who were still recovering from last year will be served first this time around, she said, though KURRVE may develop some form of triage.
“We’re probably going to go to the home that still has water pouring in, or the six inches of mud,” she said. “But that’s not to say that these people that we’ve been helping from last year are going to fall off the radar.”
As of July 22, Race said she hadn’t received any phone calls to follow up about the damage to her home. She is hesitant to call 211 again. She said she doesn’t want to put pressure on an already backlogged system.
“I’ll give them a couple weeks, and then after that, if I don’t hear anything from them, then I will call them,” she said. “I just want to make sure that the people that don’t have homes, they should come first because they’re living on the streets, or they’re living wherever they can find a place. At least I can live in my home.”
In the meantime, she made it to the Hardwick Senior Center the other day to pick up a free fan and box of cleaning supplies courtesy of Hardwick Area Neighbor to Neighbor.
With a rake and the cleaning supplies she managed to clear out most of the water from her basement herself but said another hard rain would likely put her back to square one.
As she continues trying to restore her basement, she said she’s running out of resources and stamina. She’s the primary caretaker for her partner, she said. He has Crohn’s disease, which makes it hard for him to walk and leaves him bedridden many days. Neither of them has a source of income, she said.
“I just want to give up,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Lucia McCallum interns as the Hardwick Gazette's community resilience reporter with support from the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships. She works with editors at Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism program.
