Updated at 5:19 p.m. ET on July 21, 2023
Lamoille County, Vermont, is home to 26,000 people living in small towns nestled among the woods and mountains. It’s known for two ski resorts—Stowe and Smugglers’ Notch—and a winding river where locals and tourists fly-fish and canoe. In 2020, a ProPublica analysis identified Lamoille as the one county, across the entire United States, that could be most protected from the combined effects of climate change, including sea-level rise, wildfires, crop damage, and economic impact. But that was before the floods.
Earlier this month, five to 10 inches of rain fell in Morrisville, near the center of the county. Roads were destroyed in nearby Wolcott. Thirty people were evacuated as floodwaters from the Lamoille River swirled around Cambridge. Entire harvests were wiped out, and major roads became impassable. Jennifer Morrison, Vermont’s public-safety commissioner, called Lamoille County “the hardest-hit area” in the state.
July’s flood is just the latest in a string of extreme weather events in Vermont this year. After a historically warm January, a late-May frost may have destroyed more than half of the state’s commercial apple crop. By summer, smoke from Canadian wildfires choked the once-clean air. Then, during the week of July 10, heavy rains flooded the state capital, Montpelier, and washed out homes and businesses across the state. It was the worst flooding since Hurricane Irene, a “100-year” storm that struck only 12 years ago.
Vermont is no longer the haven many believed it to be. And if this tiny, bucolic state isn’t safe, far from the ocean in one of the coolest parts of the country, it’s hard to imagine a place that is.
Academics have long had an interest in identifying “climate havens”—regions that may be less likely to suffer extreme heat, sea-level rise, and inland flooding as the global temperature continues to climb, and that may have the capacity to accommodate climate refugees. Vermont towns are often on these lists. One, compiled by the Tulane University real-estate professor Jesse Keenan just last year, included Burlington, Vermont, along with cities such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Asheville, North Carolina. And yet, 100-year storms could hit Pittsburgh as frequently as every two decades, according to a recent analysis by the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation; in the coming decades, Asheville is predicted to be prone to drought, extreme heat, and extreme precipitation. If conditions look this bad in the so-called havens, we’re in for a much-needed awakening.
When you live in a supposed climate haven, it’s easy to get complacent—to think of the climate crisis as something that happens in other parts of the nation. I’ve covered climate change for a decade, almost as long as I’ve lived in Vermont. I knew the science and the predictions: stronger storms and more extreme precipitation events. I shouldn’t have been shocked when the Battenkill River flooded its banks eight miles north of me and angry waters rushed into my friends’ homes and businesses—but I was.
That perception of safety is widespread. According to local news, a recent survey found that one-third of Vermont’s new residents moved here for climate-related reasons. My friend Joe Dickson is one of them. He and his husband used to have a farm in Bastrop County, Texas, an area that was witnessing more wildfires and flash flooding every year. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey washed out a bridge and stranded their community. They moved to Peru, Vermont, only a year ago. After the flooding last week, Joe told me, he felt a “deep and anxious vigilance”—staying up all night to check the forecast, despite the fact that his house is on high ground. It was just like when he’d wake up every hour or two during storms back in Texas, going out to check the rain gauge and look at the creek, waiting for the moment it would overflow.
Longtime Vermonters have been similarly shocked by the floods. On Saturday, I ran into my friend Brad Peacock, who has lived in Shaftsbury for decades, at our local organic farm. “I don’t think I’m the only farmer who thought Vermont was better prepared for climate change,” he told me. We’re used to living in a northern, nature-forward state with progressive climate policies. We don’t expect to be caught unprepared, as we were during Hurricane Irene and again last week.
My daughters have lived in Vermont their entire lives. On the day Hurricane Irene flooded the state, my oldest, Frasier, was 2 years old, dancing in the rain at a friend’s wedding while I held her infant sister. We had no idea that soon entire towns would be cut off from the world as highways washed out. But last week’s storm was different. My daughters, now 14 and 12, got flood alerts on their phones; their friends sent videos of water rushing through their houses. After the initial rainfall, we drove north on Route 7A to survey the damage. Our tires splashed through several inches of standing water on the highway. The contents of basements were dumped into front yards for emergency safekeeping. The local park and putting green were completely submerged, and the Battenkill River—typically clear—was brown with runoff, and so high it was licking a local bridge as it roared underneath.
After we got home, our collective mood was somber. “I can feel myself anticipating something bad,” Frasier told me. Later, as we watched news footage of the flooding on the living-room couch, Zephyr was melancholy. “I feel scared that I have to grow up in a ruined version of Vermont,” she said.
Vermonters, like other rural Americans, tend to feel a deep bond with the earth around them. My farmer friend, Brad, was devastated for the locals whose fields were flooded. Some “may never get back on the land they so lovingly tended, and that truly hurts my heart,” he wrote to me. “I know what it is like to be connected to the land, and the thought of having it taken away in the blink of an eye is heartbreaking.”
Around the country, in climate havens and known risk zones, families are terrified of losing that tie to home. Farmers in Georgia are grieving the lost peach crop. Homeowners in Florida are eyeing the 90-degree sea, waiting for the day it laps their front lawn. Folks in Louisiana are watching the ocean rush underneath the stilts of a family cottage, coming ever closer to carrying it away.
In Vermont, we are fixing flooded tractors and raising money for lost crops, donating to farmers and flooded bookstores. But we know that this heartbreak is everywhere, and only poised to increase. We will find new ways to love the land and grow food. We will help our neighbors reap their harvests before the next flood. But after this summer, I suspect we will never again believe ourselves to be out of harm’s way.
This article previously misidentified the source of a list of possible climate havens.