By State › Vermont

Vermont: Overview

Download all of Vermont as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Vermont exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Vermont go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Tropical Storm Irene (2011): Vermont’s worst disaster since 1927

On August 28, 2011, Tropical Storm Irene dumped up to 11 inches of rain across Vermont, no longer a hurricane by the time it arrived, but still catastrophic. Officials called it the state’s worst natural disaster since 1927, and it killed 6 people, destroyed or damaged over 2,400 roads, 800 homes and businesses, and 300 bridges including historic covered bridges, and cut off a dozen towns and villages entirely, some reachable only by helicopter delivering food and emergency supplies. See the Risks page for the full data.

July 2023: the same river system, a new record just 12 years later

Less than a dozen years after Irene, Vermont experienced flooding its own governor called “historic and catastrophic.” The Winooski River at Montpelier crested at 21.35 feet, more than two feet above the crest Irene produced, downtown Montpelier under water again, this time second only to the legendary 1927 flood in the state’s records. Unlike Irene, this flooding came from a slow, days-long rain event rather than a named storm, a reminder that the storm doesn’t need a hurricane’s name attached to produce a record-breaking result. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Vermont: this manual’s guidance about towns being cut off entirely during a flood, not just individual homes flooding, applies directly here given Irene’s helicopter resupply of isolated communities, and Vermont households should treat “record flood level” the way Maine’s page frames it, a number that can be broken again within just over a decade, not a stable historical ceiling.

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