HARDWICK – Many Hardwick residents can remember a time when a storm meant steady rain for a day or two. Roads might flood. Fields might pond. Rivers would rise and eventually return to their banks.
The floods of recent years felt different.
In July 2023, portions of the Hardwick area received approximately seven inches of rain within a matter of hours, causing severe flooding.
Severe flooding followed again in July 2024. Residents watched water rise quickly, roads close, banks erode and familiar places change.
Those experiences raise an important question: Are we planning for the storms of the future, or the storms of the past?
For generations, communities built dams, bridges, culverts, stormwater systems and roads using the best information available at the time. Engineers studied rainfall records, river flows and historic flood patterns. Communities invested in infrastructure designed to meet the conditions they expected to face.
For many years those systems worked as intended.
The challenge is that infrastructure is built to last for decades.
The bridge, culvert or dam constructed fifty or one hundred years ago was designed using the information available then. The engineers who designed those structures could not know what future rainfall patterns, land use changes or flood conditions might look like.
Today, communities across Vermont are finding that some of those assumptions no longer align with the conditions they are experiencing.
In Hardwick, this has prompted conversations about Jackson Dam, bridges, culverts, flood-prone neighborhoods, wastewater infrastructure and emergency access routes.
Communities throughout Vermont and across the country are asking many of the same questions.
Engineers often design infrastructure using estimates of how much rain may fall during a given storm. But timing matters too. Two inches of rain spread across an entire day creates very different conditions than two inches falling within a single hour.
The amount of water may be the same, but the way it moves through a watershed can be very different.
When rainfall is spread across a day, rivers, streams and drainage systems have time to respond. When large amounts of rain fall within a few hours, water moves through a watershed much differently. Streams rise faster. Culverts fill more quickly. Roads can be overtopped with little warning.
That does not mean infrastructure is failing.
It means infrastructure is being asked to perform under conditions that may differ from those anticipated when it was originally designed.
That is one reason communities throughout Vermont are looking more closely at bridges, culverts, dams, flood walls and stormwater systems. The goal is not to find fault with decisions made in the past. In most cases, those decisions were entirely reasonable based on the information available at the time.
The question is whether the assumptions that guided those decisions still fit the conditions we see today.
This conversation extends beyond any single project.
Whether a community is discussing a bridge replacement, a culvert upgrade, a stormwater improvement project or an aging dam, the underlying question is often the same: How do we prepare for the conditions we are likely to face in the future?
Sometimes the answer is maintenance. Sometimes it is upgrading existing infrastructure. Sometimes it is changing how we think about floodplains, rivers and the role they play during storms.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that communities must understand both past conditions and future risks.
These questions are not unique to Hardwick. After repeated flooding, communities throughout Vermont are reevaluating infrastructure that may have performed well for decades but is now being tested under different conditions.
Recent floods have reminded us that rivers are dynamic systems. They move water, sediment and energy through a landscape whether we pay attention to them or not.
Understanding how those systems work will not prevent every flood.
But it can help communities make better decisions about the infrastructure they maintain, the projects they invest in and the assumptions they make about the future.
Because the question is no longer whether conditions are changing.
The question is whether we are planning for those changes.
Kristen Leahy serves as the Zoning and Floodplain Administrator and the Resilience & Adaptation Coordinator for the Town of Hardwick.
