Update from Vermont

Dear friends, Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Worse and worse news coming to me from the region. Got a phone call today from a picture framer I use whose business is in Randolph. She told me 331 homes in Vermont have been destroyed by the storm, 20 in her town of Bridgewater alone. People I talk to have friends and neighbors who have lost their homes, or all of whose possessions are piled in moldering heaps in front of what they hope to recover as a home. As you know, home insurance does not cover floods. Flood insurance costs over $2,000 a year, and most people in this state don’t have that kind of money. It’s a total wipeout for them.

I thought of FEMA, but the picture framer told me she was in Munson, Massachusetts where the tornado ripped off roofs this June, and they still have blue tarps on their houses and not a dime of FEMA aid has reached them yet. You can imagine how stretched thin FEMA is these days.

Yesterday I drove to Randolph village. I passed a church with a sign: “Free hot showers and household goods.” I took a turn down by their river, the Third Branch of the White River. There are some little businesses down there. In a case of excruciating irony, there in front of a soaked-out building with a sign for a business that promised remediation of mold and water damage towered a pile of sodden used furniture and miscellany: a canoe resting on a couch, upside-down televisions—all from the second-hand shop next door. Nothing anyone was going to be able to do soon about those buildings. I heard that in Pittsford, the townspeople were stranded as well. They had no power and thus no water. There is only one small general store. It ran out of diapers right away and people with babies were having distressing problems dealing with them since they couldn’t wash anything that could have substituted for throw-away diapers.

People are losing their jobs because they can’t get to work. Cars are trapped on the other side of broken bridges. Routes to work have doubled, tripled in length due to road and bridge closures so workers are spending huge amounts of time and money keeping their jobs. Festivals and farmers’ markets are cancelled. And farmers cannot legally sell any crops from flooded fields, as ruled this week by the USDA, because of such things as Randolph’s sewage control plant falling into the river, as well as entire cars with their petrochemical contaminants.

What does this mean for our pumpkin-seed field….? But we will not suffer. We want for nothing.

My acupuncturist is providing free stress treatments for anyone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and grief.

Questions arise I am not used to considering. How soon can bridges be replaced? What if this happens again? How do planners determine priorities and what will get rebuilt? How long will towns like Rochester and Pittsford be out of reach?

So last night I went to our beautiful flood-free garden and picked loads of beans for hungry people. I can’t give them away raw, because people don’t have cooking apparatus. I’ll go to the store and get some bacon and cook them all together in a recipe that I think will appeal to lots of people. Comfort food. I’ll get it to the Red Cross in Bethel, along with any clothing and household items I can spare. And then, I will choose from the following list compiled by Vermont Public Interest Research Group and make some donations.

Do you think you could do the same?

Thank you and love, Josie

NEWS, UPDATES, HELP REQUESTS:

DONATIONS

• Text FOODNOW to 52000 to donate $10 to Vermont Foodbank. The Foodbank will turn each donation into $60 for families in need.

• You can also donate to the American Red Cross of Vermont and the New Hampshire Valley. The Red Cross set up shelters immediately after Irene hit for flooded-out families to stay in.

• The VT Irene Flood Relief Fund is raising money to help people and communities affected by flooding. 100% of all donations will be distributed to businesses and families. The fund was set up by Todd Bailey (the former director of Vermont League of Conservation Voters) and is being administered through the Vermont State Employees Credit Union.

• Vermont Baseball Tours has set up the 8/28 Fund to raise money. Donations of $20 or more get you a cool t-shirt.

• The MRV Community Fund has been reestablished to help Mad River Valley farmers who saw devastating crop losses due to the flooding.