Losing Ground: Vermont’s Struggle Against River Erosion

MARSHFIELD — Julie Rapczynski wasn’t worried that her home on the Nasmith Brook would flood. She couldn’t even see the quiet little river more than 300 feet away, hidden behind a wall of trees at the far edge of her property. 

Then, on July 10, 2023, torrential rain turned the river fast and swift. It cut into the hill above her home, causing landslides. It also tore a new path through her backyard. One year to the day later, another storm came. The river charged down the new path near her home, eating into the riverbank closest to her house. 

“The water started to erode,” she said. “We had like six feet from the deck to the water, and then we had no feet. It went under the deck. It was exposing wires. It was really scary.”

By August 2024, Green Mountain Power, her utility company, warned that it would soon shut the power off. The river had eroded so much of their land that it was approaching their electrical lines. 

Rapczynski and her husband, Ray, soon left their home of five years. 

River erosion is the greatest naturally occurring threat to Vermonters. It’s responsible for the vast majority of the state’s flood damage, officials say, including most of the more than $800 million in destruction caused by the floods in 2023 and 2024. 

When rivers and streams are powered by heavy rainstorms, they can cut into the land around them, causing erosion. Most of Vermont’s rivers are unstable, scientific assessments show, meaning their riverbanks are more likely to collapse in storms, causing landslides, destroying roads and sending houses tumbling into the water.  

More than 21,000 buildings are located in Vermont’s river corridors, where erosion occurs, according to state officials. Tens of thousands of Vermonters live in those buildings.

Many homes in the state, including the Rapczynskis’, are not located within flood zones mapped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA hasn’t mapped most of the small streams in Vermont, and the agency does not consider erosion risk in its maps.

As climate change increases the threat of flooding in Vermont, the thousands of property owners at greatest risk have few options.

The state has studied the problem and put in place policies to reduce future erosion risks – giving rivers more space to roam, reducing development in river corridors and moving some homes and businesses out of the path of rivers. 

But that will take decades, or even centuries to have an impact. 

In the meantime, the state has no plan to help people who are currently at risk from river erosion. 

This is “the toughest nut” to crack, said Julie Moore, who leads Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources. 

“As state agencies, we have to be able to hold, at the same time, that larger reality that there isn’t a simple fix – that there will be enough money and things will be okay,” Moore said.

About The Coming Storm: For a year, VTDigger, with support from FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, has reported on Vermont’s capacity to manage recovery from natural disasters. VTDigger obtained emails from state officials regarding assistance to flood survivors, reviewed state and federal disaster funding and risk-reduction plans, examined federal proposals to change the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and analyzed FEMA data on disaster aid, with assistance from Eric Sagara of Big Local News at Stanford University and Erin Petenko of VTDigger. VTDigger also interviewed flood survivors, frontline recovery workers, state and local officials, lawmakers, emergency management experts, scientists, and social services providers, among others, for this series.

Controlling the rivers

Vermont has more than 7,000 miles of rivers, around which many of the state’s cities and towns were built. Rivers once powered mills and factories, provided transportation, and gave farmers easy access to irrigation.

As Vermont cities and towns grew, decades of state policy focused on flood prevention through controlling rivers. Officials built dams, dredging and straightening rivers to keep them neatly alongside roads and underneath bridges. Those measures also helped prevent rivers from overflowing their banks.

But, in heavy rains, straight rivers that can’t access natural floodplains – areas of land next to rivers and streams that slow down rivers and soak up excess water – get stronger and cut deeper. 

“That’s the fire hose effect,” said Rob Evans, Rivers Program manager with the state Department of Environmental Conservation. 

Today, state surveys show that about 75% of Vermont’s rivers are disconnected from their floodplains.

Vermont’s mountainous terrain makes flooding — and erosion — more likely. During heavy storms, rain-swollen streams can run down steep mountainsides, causing landslides and dumping water into narrow river valleys.

In the late 1990s, the state shifted its flood prevention strategy to focus on large-scale floodplain restoration projects, which involved using large machinery to move rivers and create new floodplains, according to Mike Kline, a river ecologist who used to lead Vermont’s Rivers Program.

But many of those projects soon failed, because the rivers took a different path than the scientists expected, said Kline, who retired from the state in 2019.

Kline remembers sitting with his boss in northern Vermont, on the banks of the Trout River, which had just “blown apart” one of their projects. 

“The Trout River is going to sort this out for itself,” Kline recalled telling his boss. “And it was then we decided that our number one priority was river corridor protection as a program. We got out of the big yellow machine business.”

Now the state’s policies are centered around giving rivers space to move and revert back to their more natural, curving paths – wherever possible. 

By protecting river corridors, the area where a river is most likely to move and cause erosion, policymakers aim to restore rivers’ stability. 

“Rivers have a physical imperative,” Evans said. “The river is going to take that space. It’s just a matter of when.”

“No one was offering that”

But as rivers take more space, they could threaten the homes of thousands of Vermonters.

In Plainfield, erosion has been causing landslides for decades, according to multiple studies by town resident George Springston, a geologist and an assistant professor at Norwich University,  Floods in the 1980s washed away two houses.

“We knew that there were houses that, ideally, there should be buyouts for,” Springston said in a recent interview. “But there was no money to buy out all the houses. There just was not. I have no idea where anyone would have said, ‘You got five houses that aren’t in good places? Here’s some money to buy them.’ No one was offering that.”

In 2021, Vermont officials created the Flood Resilient Communities Fund to launch a state buyout program. 

The fund would purchase homes at risk of flooding or erosion at their pre-storm value. The federal government provided most of the money – $20 million – with the state contributing an additional $5.8 million.

Experts say that buyouts, which are voluntary, have several benefits. They help flood survivors get back on their feet financially, often giving them the pre-storm value of their homes. They reduce risks in areas prone to flooding and erosion, potentially saving lives. They save taxpayer dollars because governments no longer pay to repair repeated flood damage in the same area. (Most buyout land is not redeveloped.) And over time, they can be less expensive than projects that protect homes from encroaching rivers, which can also make erosion worse over time.

Vermont used the money to buy 52 properties, including the Rapczynskis’ home. They applied to the state’s program in April 2024, and, within a year, they had purchased a new home a few towns over, in Danville. 

“I consider our situation a success because we were able to leave,” Julie Rapczynski said. 

In 2024, lawmakers set aside $3.5 million for a new, similar program, called the Community Resilience and Disaster Mitigation Grant Program to help 2023 flood survivors elevate their homes above floodplains. In the future, the fund could help with disaster mitigation including buyouts, but lawmakers don’t currently have plans to replenish it. 

Rep. Robin Scheu, D-Middlebury, the chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, said the state doesn’t have money for buyouts.

“When we were doing this budget, we were looking at food — more people are going hungry,” she said. “Housing, a perennial problem. Healthcare, especially primary care, and the cost of health insurance. There are a lot of competing priorities, and I think the way we all need to be looking at this is saying, ‘What are the highest priorities?’”

In recent elections, voters haven’t named a state buyout fund as a priority, Rep. Scheu said. “Unless it’s right in your face, it’s not top of mind for folks,” she said.

Last year, Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources recommended that the state put a minimum of $5 million into the buyout fund on an ongoing basis, describing such an investment as a top priority to reduce erosion risks and recovery costs following major storms. But the report noted the need to find “sustainable, ongoing funding for the program” and said it should not come from an increase in taxes or fees.

If the fund is replenished, homeowners could apply for buyouts and the state’s scientists would have to decide which to prioritize. Thus far, they have mapped the river corridors, but state officials haven’t proactively identified “properties where, before the next flood hits, we could perhaps get those folks out of harm’s way,” Evans said.

“Yeah, that isn’t happening,” he said. “Just because, that’s easier said than done.”

Vermont typically gets funding after floods hit — which it uses for recovery and climate resilience planning. 

“Mitigation has largely been reactive,” Evans said. 

Moore, head of the state’s Agency of Natural Resources, says the state considers erosion an urgent issue. She pointed to Vermont’s 2024 Flood Safety Act, which will require a new state permit for any new construction in the state’s river corridors.

When the legislation takes effect in two years, Moore said she hopes it will “reduce new investments being made in bad places.”

The new law is a necessary step, but doesn’t come close to solving the problem, said Kevin Geiger, chief planner for Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, which helps municipalities in eastern Vermont navigate disasters.

Rather, those regulations are acting to “stop stabbing the patient,” Geiger said.

Because the Rapczynskis’ home is not located in a FEMA flood zone, it’s harder for them to qualify for a federal buyout. Experts say that most of the country’s FEMA maps are outdated and don’t account for changing land use patterns and the increasing risk of flooding due to climate change.

FEMA declined interview requests for this series, instead answering questions by email. Asked whether its flood maps would be updated to better account for erosion risk in Vermont, an agency spokesperson responded that “FEMA is always reviewing its programs to seek efficiencies and improve their performance.”

“Fluvial [river] erosion does not necessarily disqualify a property from acquisition programs, which seek to mitigate losses and consider eligibility, technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness,” the spokesperson said.

State officials expect FEMA’s maps to be updated by 2030, and in some communities, by 2027. But they still won’t account for erosion risks, according to Ned Swanberg, the state’s flood hazard mapping coordinator.

FEMA officials know that the homes located in their mapped hazard areas face flood risks. But getting buyouts for homes outside of those areas is a more difficult process, according to state officials. 

“There needs to be a state buyout program, full stop, that’s wicked robust, that can deal with things that don’t qualify for FEMA buyouts,” said Pete Fellows, a certified floodplain manager with the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission.

Battling the elements

In the middle of a rainy night in late July of 2024, Leena Aly got a flash flood alert on her phone. Beyond the deck of her rental home in Lyndon, the visiting dental student normally saw gravel and a river a stone’s throw away. Now, she could see a torrent of water right outside her door. The small home shook. It dipped toward the river.

“I stepped with my right foot off of the tiny house, the steps, and I immediately was in the water,” Aly said in an interview after the storm. “I had no chance to stand. There was no standing.”

The current pulled her underwater, and she screamed when she surfaced. She tried to grab onto branches, but they were becoming completely unearthed from the riverbed.

When she finally grabbed a stable branch, she called 9-1-1 from her cell phone, which she had managed to hold onto in the raging waters. Rescuers searched for Aly, but couldn’t find her. The Hawkins Brook had erased most of the road.

“I thought I was going to die,” Aly said. “It was really just a moment of just battling with the elements. And I’ve never in my life thought I could be that close to death.”

River erosion can happen slowly, over years — or within hours, causing catastrophic damage during intense storms. 

Between midnight and 5 a.m. on July 30, 2024, nearly 8 inches of rain fell on a small area in northern Vermont, including Lyndon. Her rental and three other houses on Red Village Road were destroyed. One belonged to a family with three children who fled just before their house fell into the river. 

Another home was swept downstream with 98-year-old Dorothy “Pete” Blackadar and her niece, Paula, inside. Both survived “due to the help and heroics of a neighbor,” said Gov. Phil Scott, who knew Blackadar, during an event last year commemorating the floods.

The flooding and erosion in Lyndon reshaped the landscape overnight. Residents who saw clear skies before they went to sleep woke up to what looked “like a totally different place,” Rose Reynolds, Aly’s neighbor, said after the storm. “Like we were dropped out of the sky, and now we’re in a new town or something.”

A different flood had hit Lyndon weeks earlier, on July 10, when water rose slowly from the riverbanks and covered large portions of the town. Town Administrator Justin Smith said the second flood “was much more quick, a lot less warning, and obviously resulted in a great deal of damage.” Both floods destroyed homes. 

Vermont’s annual rainfall has increased by 7.3 inches since the early 1900s. Three weeks before the storm in Lyndon, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl dropped nearly 5 inches of rain in Plainfield, turning the Great Brook violent. Again, the river valley walls came down. Scientists have connected Hurricane Beryl, which was fueled by record-warm ocean temperatures, to climate change.

For over a century, the Great Brook had been contained in a channel. But on that July night, the stream claimed a new path that, as in Lyndon, changed the shape of the entire river valley. Now, the Great Brook spreads out in a wide curve where Brook Road used to be.

The flooding destroyed nearly 36 homes in Plainfield, displacing as many as 70 people in the town of around 1,200. The town isn’t sure yet whether it will rebuild the road. If it does, cost estimates range between $12 million to $21 million. The town’s annual budget in 2025 was $1.8 million.

If the town doesn’t rebuild the road, “extended travel times between residents and the Village, delayed response times for emergency service providers, and longer drives between Plainfield and Barre would persist,” according to a recent report that detailed replacement options. 

In his 2001 paper, Springston, the geologist at Norwich University, found that Brook Road took up much of the stream’s floodplain, increasing erosion along the riverbanks. 

Springston said the fact that no one died in Plainfield’s 2024 flood was “just luck.”

Temporary fixes 

Flooding in 2023 and 2024 in Middlesex washed out driveways and threatened homes, which sit along the edge of another river named Great Brook, and altered the landscape.

Trees now tilt at unnatural angles, their canopies colliding above the river, and small landslides dot the riverbanks. Another big storm could collapse the riverbanks and send the trees tumbling into the stream.

During the 2023 flood, Linda Helms, a physical therapist and ski patrol member whose house sits along the Great Brook, evacuated to her neighbors’ home across the street. From there, she monitored her porch light — if she could see it, she remembers thinking, her house must still be there.

Her home sustained almost no damage, she said, but the flood destroyed her gardens, washed away some of her land, and caused a landslide directly across from her house. One year later, in the 2024 flood, her house again stayed mostly dry, but she found in the morning that the river had moved much closer to the back of her house. 

“I lost land — lost a shit ton of land — to the stream,” she said.

After the first round of flooding she scrambled to protect her home. She said she felt “powerless, out of control.” She did not want to go through a winter with her house unprotected. 

“I’ve always had a very strong respect for water,” she said. “I’ve always been in water, in water sports. I grew up by the ocean, body surfing my whole kid-hood.” 

But the floods changed that feeling. The water was “so loud for so long,” she said. She used to enjoy listening to the brook, which she can hear from her bedroom. 

“I don’t like the sound of the brook,” she said. “I do not like it.”

She received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Watershed Protection Program to secure the riverbank near her home with a wall of rocks, called riprap. 

While these projects may protect individual homes, experts say that they have downsides: They keep the river acting like a firehose, unable to spread out into its floodplain. And the riprap sometimes needs to be replaced soon after it’s installed.

“This can go next year in a thousand-year flood,” Helms said.

Kline, the retired river ecologist, studied those projects for the town of Middlesex. According to his research, at least 8% of the riprap that had been installed after the 2023 and 2024 floods was already failing by the spring of 2025.

The USDA acknowledges the watershed protection projects can fail soon after they’re built. The agency limits how often it will replace riprap to two times in 10 years. 

Helms says she’s staying put for now. 

“I’ve thought about selling this house. I wouldn’t find a house that I can afford, a mortgage that I could afford,” she said. “Maybe I would have to move out of Vermont.”

“What are we up against?” 

Like many rivers in Vermont, the Huntington River and its tributaries weave through farm fields and in between houses, under bridges, and through the heart of downtown Huntington.

The town flooded in 2019, then badly in 2024. Resident Amy Seoane said the river ripped through her neighborhood in the 2024 flood. When the floodwaters receded, the gravel in the riverbed had moved, changing the river’s path. It’s now pointed at homes in Huntington Acres, where she lives.

Seoane has organized a group of residents that has pleaded with town and state officials to help them remove some of the gravel to protect their homes. While state officials told her they could permit some of the work, the state wouldn’t pay for any of it, Seoane said.

Many flood survivors have argued that Vermont should dredge rivers to control flooding, as it has done in the past, but the state has moved away from the practice.

Vermont now requires anyone who wants to move a significant amount of material in a river’s channel to obtain a stream alteration permit. If the work is likely to make erosion worse, the state won’t approve it. Even if the state grants an alteration permit, it won’t pay for the work.

The policy is intended to prevent large-scale “hogging out the rivers, put the flood water back in the channel, make them deep and steep and get it off my land” types of projects, said Evans, of Vermont’s Rivers Program. In the long term, the policy could help rivers return to a more meandering, less dangerous state.

In the short term, it leaves residents with few options. 

At a meeting in January with state officials, leaders of several community recovery groups said flood survivors don’t know how they can protect their homes, according to a recording VTDigger obtained through a public records request. 

There is “a whole bucket” of flood survivors in north central Vermont who want to do streambank stabilization on their property, said Mike Dacey, who leads a recovery group in Waterbury. 

“Some of them have received permits and just got to the point where, if they had the money to pay for it, they would do it, but these are massively expensive projects,” he said, noting they often cost in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Moore said her agency sent river engineers to Huntington to see what it would take to “essentially dredge the Huntington River in a manner that would appreciably reduce the flood risk to those folks.”

“The price tag was enormous, well north of a million dollars, if not more,” she said. “But perhaps more challenging than the price tag is the fact that they believed all of that dredging would be undone in the next significant rainfall event.”

Town officials are considering some changes to the river. With FEMA funding, they have hired engineers to design two projects that would protect public infrastructure. Engineers are also considering whether any projects could benefit residential property, said Adam Argeropoulos, Huntington’s town administrator. 

Argeropoulos said the town often feels pulled in two directions when it comes to the debate about whether to touch the river.

“There’s the science saying it’s not a good idea,” he said. “And then there’s the other side, which is like, ‘Well, my great great grandfather did this, and his son did this, and then I did this, and now you’re telling me I can’t do it? And so what, you want me to give up my house?’”

“I see both sides very clearly, and I don’t think one is more right than the other,” he said.

Seoane said she’s attended public meetings in Huntington at which officials and river experts have raised the idea that houses should never have been built in the floodplain.

“We went to one of those meetings, and we all had to leave because our blood pressure was through the roof,” Seoane said. “We keep saying, we didn’t just build these houses, they were permitted 60 plus years ago.”

In 2024, Soane asked FEMA for a buyout, but she worried the agency would reject her application because her home is located just outside of the agency’s designated flood zones. Last month, she learned FEMA said it would approve buyouts for her and 10 other households in Huntington.

But Soane isn’t sure she will take the offer. Given Vermont’s housing shortage, she’s worried she won’t be able to afford another home in the state. 

“It’s not ideal to be relocating right now, and I don’t believe we could do it,” she said. “But then, if we stay and we turn down the buyout, what are we up against, with no work done on the river and storms getting worse?” 

This story was reported with support from FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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The series continues. Our third and final story in The Coming Storm: Disaster recovery can be expensive and complicated, with enormous financial consequences for survivors. As federal agencies cut back on disaster assistance, is Vermont prepared to help them?

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Read the story on VTDigger here: Losing Ground: Vermont’s Struggle Against River Erosion.