about here the wind drops down about three three and a half feet and so the water never came much beyond you know came up to the level of the grass i'm standing on now when my children were the weather reports from the weather service saying you know they expect quite a storm and my thoughts were and i probably said it a hundred times a day before this noise from the river we're not going to have any ice jams we're not having the flooding when it was going on right this isn't  hurricane this is a rain storm just not a year before hurricane irene we had a tremendous storm with gusts up to two hundred miles an hour and had considerable damage from that so we'd really tied everything down and we were we felt really ready it felt kind of ominous and that it was very quiet nobody was out and we walked to the river just to look and we are soaking wet shortly after we got back from our walk our neighbor sharon and wendell dwyer who live right there called us and they are stoic vermonters they do not show you know they're not dramatic people and they said stephanie you guys should think about leaving the house the course the weather reports kept getting worse and worse and worse and we notified all the other telnet agencies that we may be calling on you for assistance and so they were on things like that and getting the guys together and making sure that they knew what we might do a case the water did come up well it went on till about probably a maybe nine and the water was coming up to the stand sign over here and nobody had come down or know it so chris started going down the street telling people got to get two cars off the street and case he gets up too far so whenever that i'm concerned about the park flooding in the bridge funding i'll take a look at the look at the noah web site they have a h and it shows what they expect to find say whether or not going to flood him with the levels will be so that when i looked at to decide how do i truly be concerned about this or not be concerned about this and when i looked at what they projected i realized that there was a good chance to be evacuated my dad lived in that brown house for sixty two years and he's never seen a flood like this and i was asking him you know we are talking a lot and i think what should we do and so don't worry we were both like there's no way anything like this is going to happen but kept coming up coming up and we kept marking it and coming back and it was one point rose six inches and forty five minutes what surprised everyone was the fact that both the north branch and of the of the new ski and the mad river peaked at the same time so off stream of those places there wasn't real flooding sense of flooding at all it's just in those few towns richmond waterbury and just above there where the only talent really experienced the flooding on the in this case we got another phone call from mark's mother who lives in southern vermont in springfield and she called with panic in her voice and said southern vermont is getting hit really hard i'm worried about you guys and that's when i got off the phone and said marc we're packing bags everybody packed bags are leaving the house so we grabbed our cat and we should we just shoved everything in the car and ran and went up the street to my mother's and left the back porch on eight thirty nine o'clock pretty much decided that the water was coming up fast enough to be worrisome and removed most of what we could for basement what happen is the water coming down through the sewer drain once they got to be too much for the sewer plant shut down so all of that water is coming down here into the river into the river and everywhere knocked on doors along with the fire department they blew sirens they you know tried to contact everybody some one or two people i guess got i'll say their houses were a mess but they didn't hear it it came up  rather rapidly in a half hour period something like that and i said you know this enough of this i don't want to die in my house because i know better so we've got in our car left at ten thirty we had been monitoring our storm catch basins in the river level and for most of the day there really wasn't anything going on late at night i got a call about eleven thirty that the f evacuating people in the lower parts of the village you know even the like about nine ten o'clock my dog was whining my cat was just they were just kind of pacing and then he wanted to go out and i didn't want to go out and then  in i just i actually put them in my bedroom because i said i don't feel comfortable there acted kind of weird and just in case something happened and i guess maybe that was a little intuition because i just i want them somewhere where i can get them really quick and  back deck and at that particular time my neighbor came over and said we need to move our cars and i said we never move our cars when you know are you kidding and he said no we need to move our cars and it's a good thing we did because by the time we went up to the corner of esplanade street there was a ready and and then it was about two o'clock in the morning i go down and make sure that little bucket that i had a drip a water pump it out it started coming in all four corners of the water and then and then and bought one in the morning the water was all up here in the front lawn i realized a problem with the flooding when i got a call about one o'clock in the morning for one of my patrol officers so that the town was water was rising rapidly they had some issues with people that were at homes that they couldn't get to and i remember i didn't go to sleep that night and i kept hearing trees crash against the bridge making a dul metallic song all night long and worrying how bad this is really going to be my periodic we go out on my deck with a spotlight and check the level of the river and it was coming up but it came up fast came to the house i guess he knocked but nobody heard it and then started yelling up into the window and welcome my mother who then woke us up and he was saying water is that your house she better come quickly i think i had sandals on or something and he said they're in there with long tall boots on and long sleeved shirt nose like oh my you know and then i look we walk around the corner i see the house and the water is you know past the yard over here and already up onto touching the porch and so we ran right in and he went down the basement to do the main switch i looked around behind on the stairs and there was a flow of water coming into the basement through the rocks stones and i was just like going i don't remember seeing a hole that big in our basement ever so so what his suggestion was after that was to get up stairs and pull everything off the floor of the first floor so we put it all up on tabletops and then left the house like we just in time for him yeah well yes i went back to the basement door and opened it up and it was already to the top of my neighbors and my family and his family we tried to walk off the street but the water was running up at the front of the story and it was up to there thought i and they're like no we can't walk through this the front part of the house there's little ravine that goes down to the next yard  so that part with all flooded too so we were pretty much kind of stuck here like ok not a big deal we'll just wait it out but by two in the morning i went down to my basement and water was just coming  the cinder blocks and so at that time my boyfriend john and my son and we were down in the basement trying to get things up off the ground because there was a lot of water in the basement and we heard a crack and all of a sudden we looked and this wall of water just flushed you know just pouring in so we we stood there because it's a real you like it's a movie that i've never seen this before and i heard john say run so we ran over to the stairs but i have actually because of the force of the water because the stairs were going this way in the water the wall that the water was coming in it kind of pushed my feet out so i grabbed the stairs with my hand and i heard my son say mom and he literally picked me up and kind of threw me up the steps by the time john who was the last one on the steps got up for halfway up that back wall collapsed so at this time two sides of my foundation gave way and water was just pouring in my basement and really it filled the basement pretty quick we called nine one one and then my neighbors one side of his foundation gave way and but then that was that two and we had to wait until four in the morning until a volunteer fireman brought his fishing boat  to come and rescue us they got a boat which had the come all over just to get here there were fifteen of us from our street that were taken from our block over one of the rescue came over and  everybody you know we got everybody calm down and we started picking them out and about that time my wall below i'm looking up at the roof of my neighbor's porch saying oh my god is this going to be like katrina of it i'm going to have to save my kids or we're going to have gotten us because i knew there was there was still we could get through for about four o'clock in the morning we could see that it was not coming up in the more there's a pig farm at the end of the wheeling it was one of the most disturbing sounds i could ever remember in my life and then only of couple of hours later is when the fire engines came and started to evacuate my mother street because the water had already reached that area and our four in the morning i got word that in fact it was rushing through the barn with the horses in it and that christo was no longer able to get from her home into the barn to check on them so we mobilized and started the track to to make our way from essex all the way here and there were many many detours and downed trees and flooding and so it took us about an hour to get about five hundred feet down the road at which point we were stuck because down this portion of cochran road was a solid three feet of water the water it sounded like had about peaked when we were finally made it to the property and the water was rushing through the center of the barn the highest stalls which are the majority of them had about four to five inches of water coming through them the horses were surprisingly calm but  we stayed up till probably three in the morning and then we looked on line and found out it was going to crest at like five thirty so we just woke up then and just commuter and for field i thought it was sort of crazy and something that was really interesting to be here for and at the same time it just hadn't sunk in that we were done for the year the bridge was still in a lot of people were milling around wondering you know just wondering and and i was wondering when i'd be able to cross the next morning when my oldest twelve year old daughter you know went out to get the newspaper and you know we realized we could see the river from our house some we'd never been able to see the river before it was sort of subli the water in nobody was hurt that i know of so that's what you try to provide i'm sure there's some remembered says that aren't too close but everybody's still here to remember that's just luck ok it could hit an area you know where people either ignored the notification or didn't hear the notification and then drown in the water and i think we were lucky i mean the state had i think five deaths four or five deaths when we came back in six in the morning and we started to walk down the street that's when the full impact really hit that our house looked like it was in an ocean and it was just such a strange feeling to be standing there looking at my house with everyone looking at our house and us and then the media suddenly like you're the people we want to talk to and suddenly we're just thrown into that you know being interviewed and being on  and the whole thing and it was just so strange but i felt like such a cliche of the new and growing to a house and then look like every flood photograph from mississippi to the carolinas to whatever and i was just like shocked that this was me this time so at the peak of the flood the water was about to hear at this point in our field and this is a higher spot in our field in the house that was probably right over here and then the about two and a half feet of water was flowing through here so anywhere you stood we're standing it is water about this through here the water was up about this far and it was the center of bridge street down to the bridge and esplanade the park or brooklyn core and over almost up to the round church and then down on cochran road with a horse farm and johnsons live it was totally submerged and a lot of people didn't realize that there was so much devastation in jonesville and on cochran road i do know that out on cochran road they didn't realize the water was coming up as fast as it did and one resident and her children had to just go up on the with their car and she just sat there through the night because she couldn't get out so the water here as it came across the fields we believe was a balochi a foot or more higher than misspent like so it stretched to the very back of the property and for the longest time we had a good water line  where it was fields was now late like for our corn fields we had been meiring the beauty of the corn all july and august about how high it was and then to think that that corn was completely under water i drove down canyon road and there buck we were pretty much isolated here we were going to get out the only way we could get out of the village was a jerk or rode up in the jericho and i thought way for a long time we couldn't do much of anything until the water started to recede i first heard about that the farm had been flooded and when my one of my employees called me at about six thirty in the morning and said the farms completely underwater and i can believe it they started to find the pigs who had gone up onto this hillside over here and i saw casey  chelsea get a shepherding pigs out towards the hardware store and i stopped and i shot some of that and i talked with them a bit and i started looking around and realized that it was just what a mess it was were pigs and sheep stranded on any high point of ground i went back to my house and i got my bar my wife's kayak and i got my waders and came back down so i found myself with camera in one hand and a bucket of feed in the other hand and we wound up sort of herding pigs through water is just a very strange thing we lost four limbs and we lost fifteen young piglets because they were in a and i realized as i got close to the end is because the water was actually starting to drop and it was creating almost an undertow really a lot of force it was as if i was standing in the wind it was impressive how quickly it came out you know as christa struggled to get cars out of the driveway and how quickly it left at the same time it took a while to get a real idea of the number of people that were affected and how badly the next day we came down and we store the come in by boat and we took all the food out and by that afternoon you could walk up the street as we were driving i don't know we were in new hampshire maybe i get this video you know my phone  our basement was full of everything that we are and it was all floating i'm sorry i went in the building of the town center and there was water up to the bottom of the stairs that go to the basement so i had on my knee high boots and went down in there and it was just everything was floating the rubber ducks from the teen center races that was a maze that's the first thing that met me was all these rubber ducks floating around so the water that was even coming up to the second third floor here was filthy the sewer pump station on the south side of the village was inundated and destroyed so we had to use a septic pump or to clear the manhole out for a period of time until we got that operational and part of the sewer plant itself the basement was damaged and kendall chamberlain our water some superintendent did a great job in putting a plan together very quickly on how he was going to continue to get longer and provide sewer to our residents so we were able to isolate that problem by plugging the sewer pipes and then pumping out the town center as we're already on the in the water did start to drop and then we just as a water drop from house to house we want the public sellers richmond fire department fourteen sellers of them to hold your home for four hours we had floating propane tanks we had propane tanks floating down the river we did call run power in and they turned off a small tree at one point and they want down through and decided which houses needed to be turned off and then they were able to restore some of the power and i did a lot with calling the guard they use their vehicles they get in supplies that people needed like that bottled water and they're ready to eat meals and stuff like that most of the people in this town were pretty self had moved in two weeks before that's why we had renovated down back and it wasn't long after that that the fire department came down and they set up to start pumping our basement they estimated we city we were able to walk on our story a little after twelve and basically saw the house and just started crying because it's just i'm thinking oh my god i don't have a home for my children anymore it was funny like we still had internet like the wife i was still running and we still had electricity and then just to look down into the basement and just see i had never seen anything like that in my life walking down to the b nothing will i kind of prepared me for the basement just completely filled up like a giant swimming pool with most of our archival possessions and our winter clothes and tons of photo and kids artwork yeah just the stuff that people store and use and need that's where last of all things the last big piece that i wrote was a middle grade novel about hurricane katrina so i had done hours and hours and hours of research on the hurricane and floods and then arriving in richmond i instantly realized that you can you can never you can never completely now i went to the back there's a two car garage barn and i run a commercial refrigeration business and i had thirty years apart and and it looked like somebody coming in and just kind picked everything up turned it all upside down and threw model over when i opened the door i close a good look at it for two weeks and we also made the decision that gone i mean it's nothing it was just memories and calendars that i wrote stuff on when we were dating all gone and a lot of that kind of stuff just that that bothered me a little bit you know some personal letters of my wife wrote me when i was down on the farm but i say they were just too far gone i used to say you know birthday cards christmas cards from people and they were all gone because we had a lot of stuff in the cellar so i knew the halloween was one of the the holidays coming up you know eventually and i thought you can't throw that away in this community for halloween like that counted on us almost a year this mask that was downstairs in our base she was our flood goddess too so and she still had mud covered all over a face by the time it ever got cleaned off again so i guess nobody seen anything like this for since the thirty's or late twenty's when mt payor flooded i was a trooper than i've actually was boating on state street the city mt they are for a small isolated area that would cause lots and lots of damage but it hard there's houses a couple many ways will never be lived in again it sounds odd to say but we were very lucky if we had we had about six homes where there was water in the living area and people were out of their homes we had thirty to forty homes where people had basements that were inundated but if we'd had a foot more water in town all of those people would have been out of their homes certainly in the one nine hundred twenty seven flood was the worst one you know on record  that affected many more people than that started on november second in one thousand twenty seven and they got eight inches of rain even in november fourth two days later this house went through the twenty seven flood and at that point they were taking people out of the second story window of this house the flood of twenty seven we found the thing up that it was up there halfway up the windows in the kitchen yes and i have a bag of a couple baggies full of silt actually from the flood of twenty seven that i took out of the windows and just put them up stairs just to keep them you know still here if you want some that's why the soil exists because of floods over generations you know over centuries so that's the good to says this is flood deposition over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years we've got had to get a pond every day from parted from the fire department to try to pump it out and took a long time and a lot lot of field thought of picking up stuff that had been washed on to here and picking up all the pieces of everything so you know all in all compared to what some other farms lost it wasn't horrible we did lose four acres of crops that we couldn't sell even though they actually there wasn't a lot of sediment deposition so those crops were all alive and growing up to the flood and they all looked great they had just been watered and fertilize we went down to like that one down towards the soccer field in the park and i stepped out as possible and there were like fish everywhere and at least save them and then there  into other portions other fields other items were picked up and washed down the river we found them closer to richmond center up in the trees the well that's on the property was submerged and had to be tested several times and shocked before we could trust that it was safe to water the twenty animals that we have it was about a month that i drove my truck from essex full of water troughs and water buckets and everything else and that's the only way we kept all the animals watered a lot of us have young children so one person would say i'll watch the kids rebuilding together and the home builders associate and habitat for humanity actually came the minister in town and some other volunteers put together a support group we got a grant from the monk community foundation and we got a grant from nova vermont the sweetest and most dear and generous people the people who are on the rise bakery than bush and his wife rachel he came right away and as soon as the water went down enough he got into the basement and spent i don't even know i just want to say and last hours working in our basement doing the most through some of the work we tried to provide you know regular meeting times for a number of days for people you know could sort of pass the news around if you want to help this is the time and place to me and we had you know just issued turnout from within town but we had people coming from north of  to volunteer to help out you know cars full of people some people brought down their equipment that we could use they offer trucks and didn't want anybody to know whose truck that was there whatever i was given to people vehicles you know if you need this use that the same thing people volunteer bedrooms for people we have a wonderful community because that day even though we were really supposed to go back in the house my son with supposed to be going to college two days later and he had all the stuff packed so john actually my boyfriend john actually went into the house and started taking stuff out and just throwing in plastic bags and i have pictures of about two and a lot of my neighbors and my kids friends they all came and they basically made a train and they just all carry these plastic bags they put it in their cars in the trucks and they just drove it over to jericho and put it in his garage so it's kind of i felt like a little bit of a refugee like you know you hear about stuff like that and but basically i was moving in plastic bags derek walked down into the basement came back up with the ringing pieces of clothing and tears in his eyes and he said this is how much i can carry this is this is and the basement was full so this is going to take us days you know he said i don't know how i'm going to do this and literally moments later our friend adam walked in he became the guy who was in charge downstairs and then another friend of ours was with me outside she would bring me over to the stuff do you want this to go in the garbage you want this to go in the dumpster do you want this to go in the salvage pile do you want this to and and when i couldn't make a decision she made the decision for me or she said we'll put that aside they just came in on their own and there were neighbors from two streets over and customers that came in with their trucks to haul the debris away and we just had so much help it was just unbelievable the able to offer this coronated organized body that really were there all day every day we had equipment we had that leadership and so the town could really send us off like he's seeking missile to say we just got a call this families in need we had a we had all that stuff we would just go and we can make it happen so they went from there with their plan was to build these very big you know forty fifty foot bridges in the in the forest service to mock you know basements and i think every single person every one of those crews felt that in either a small or large way it was really a life changing experience for them and they'd come out of there still smiling for the most part but yes ok in modern day tuesday was the beginning of the cleanup wednesday morning crack of dawn i know we were awake but seven thirty in the morning yes rebecca who we didn't know at the time but now is a dear person in her lives she she someone knocks at the door we open the door said i see the laundry out on your lawn and i'm going to take it and do it i'm going to your laundry and like who are you you know i really want to help she's a neighbor you know and lives in richmond and i gave her a bag she put it in her car she said more i want more and there was a group of volunteers who had set up a photo cleaning station they were they were sitting in a circle on the grass they were healing photos apart one by one rinsing them in a bowl of water drying them on the grass and then they had gotten clothes lines and they were hanging and clo and they were hanging them out to dry my whole life was on my front lawn my whole life everything in and it was like the more it went on the more it got to be worried because it was getting towards the weekend so one of the projects was to get everything cleaned up in the garage because there was already stories of people going around and seeing bicycles or kayaks or stuff like that and  we were getting more and more gawkers coming down and i just didn't want my life sitting on the front lawn and disappearing i mean it's one thing you have to throw your letters and stuff away but i just didn't want  now here so the biggest push for that first week was to get things cleaned up and get the garage cleaned up enough so that weekend i could get it in and that weekend turn into a lot of people driving up girls had made over holidays for years and in the last things that were important to me about memories and they were just shoving stuff out the window and i was to pick it up and throw it in the trailer and i was a wreck i mean i was i was sobbing uncontrollably i was throwing away things that i wanted to keep but i didn't know if i could and so was this feeling of just watching our life you know just the memories and everything just coming through this tiny window and  just getting it into trucks and getting it out of here we had to rip out all our walls on the first floor to the studs to try things out and to you know clean it out and so one day after everyone had left like five o'clock at the end of the day third day and i pulled off you know kind of got a crowbar and hauled off the trim board and cut out the dry wall underneath the trim line and felt for the insulation and it was it was wet and so i went out i went on to the fact from porch and sobbed for about a half hour because because i realized i have a whole nother level of repair that night actually somebody stopped by and they pulled off all the trim board two volunteers and they sent me off to go you know go rest and then the next and he stopped by asking if i needed help and i said i do but it's you know it's kind of special help i need to i need to have this dialogue cut out and he said look i'm a contractor and i've got a chalk line in my car and the saws all i know just what to do and right behind it was another fellow in a pickup truck and they had just heard that people on this street needed that and they just appeared and in they went and they cut out of my trial and and then  also because he now knew the state of my house and that i couldn't stay there he said you know how much my wife and i are going to be at a wedding this weekend and our house you know house is empty and  agency of natural resources two days after this happened or was it was out there came by and wanted to talk about our pile of dirt and apparently i knew that we had released two quarts of diesel fuel in that basement in our  neighborhood smelled like bees will feel one from our house and they came up and all you contaminated the western hemisphere and i was just like thank you and then they photographed and they photographed and so there was a little piece of stress that we didn't need to deal with then chile some reasonable people from that group came by with a probe and said this is our there was an ongoing fundraising effort and i think the final tally was around sixty six  weeks later i really felt better my fact my daughter was upstairs sleeping we pulled the bill and we dropped because you can't it's hard to lower that much weight on hydraulic jacks if you turn the screw and she came down hard and it will come up up stairs but that was the day i said we made it you could see actually the new foundation alongside their this wonderful man richard stockwell who actually is the reason my house was saved he happens to be the brother of my neighbor and the grandfather of one of my daughter's best friends and he started making phone calls because he said your house is going to collapse there's no way that little piece of cinder block is going to hold it up everybody else was getting their houses pumped out the water out of their basement but the water was the only thing that was holding my house up and he ended up getting messier house movers to come that night that after a late afternoon about six on their way home he kind of begged them to come and he did it as a favor and then he saw my house and he said ok we'll be here tomorrow morning with some steel beams to secure it and when he did return the next he said i didn't know he came at seven that i didn't know if it was going to still be ok because he just i mean it wasn't really it was barely being supported by that and he immediately put two steel beams and to support the house we were out of our house for five and a half months and we had to kind of get everything out of the basement and you know even those cinder blocks are very heavy so they had this loader but you had to kind of physically pick them up and put them on in the hot water tank the oil tank the washer dryer refrigerator i mean all this stuff and then what they had to do was come and lift the house up so they did that all of that takes time and then bill the new foundation so it just really took time getting good information to people is also a real challenge to know do i if the water's gone can i turn my electricity back on again you know what what happens when wiring gets wet i mean the water gets into the jackets in the wiring and stuff and it's still a danger even though the water's gone so you know getting good information like that i think our you know our select board some other town officials were really good it getting experts to come in and organizing an information session for people relatively quickly so that they could start to know what was important to pay attention to what is ok to do what should we not be trying to do and the whole entire first floor was gutted down to the barn board like you could see through the house like it was that got it and then it was  three months before we moved back into our house then we started to have contractors come in to do things before it got too cold we needed the eye and  in the new hot water heater it's on the on demand the energy efficient one and the contractors out back to put in all the new floors and she rocks and  get that all done the easiest thing at that point is of a get whatever cost the least that i can well that may mean you're going to pay for it over the next ten or fifteen years you know more than you need to we're still trying to decide whether we should lift up the house jack up the house and whether we can afford that which is the main reason why we haven't put sheet rock on disappear lifted up there's of the chance of all cracked we don't know how high the next level be we work with folks to figure out what are their major stressors after the storm but the key is teaching people people breeding skills teaching people ways that they can disco put on their own those people have flood insurance had a theme of that wanted to wait until the flood insurance paid out because we didn't feel was was incredibly helpful within days and still dealing with insurance paperwork and i got bounced around a lot and i was told things that weren't true car insurance company was terrible and we dropped to them we we locally to jamison after the flood i did a lot of research on crop insurance and these sort of protection we could have and what it comes down to is it's not really worth it for some for the farm our size and the income that we receive the structures where fine but there is considerable damage particularly as a small business owner who doesn't own the property there is very very little financial support the town suddenly maps we're not in the hundred year flood plain right now where you standing was in the five hundred year flood plain you can't build a hospital or a nuclear power plant here and we thought that this was ok in the turns out is that that theme in coming through and talking to the town said well you're supposed to have permits for everything that everybody does bappa model and digital mapping and pictures has said that the one hundred year flood level would be two feet higher than what it is now meaning that flood such as irene would actually have a higher rate of occurrence than a true one hundred year flood before irene the discussion was ok these new maps are going to raise the flood level increase the size of the flood plain and that's going to have negative financial impacts on people who are going to be put in the floodplain how do we deal with that after it the discussion is how do we get people not to live in the flood plain our new hundred year flood plain which was down the back of the hill is now here somewhere right about here top of my foundation so what are you going to do you know i thought about  moving just not done thinking about moving either what they say about a flood is it's unique in that it hits you twice so it's the flood itself and whatever happens for you personally during that event but then it's the clean stay there so for the say and when i found out my records room downstairs in the town office at about two and a half feet of water in it we're still dealing with that now for all the paper records from one nine hundred seventy two till that day were store downstairs at least pretty much everything other maybe a back or box or two we even though we put a dehumidifier in there that you started to have the mold issues there is not a day that goes by that stop to think oh do i want to save this you know everything had to go our large tractor for instance i've never had to send it in in to the shop in the middle of the summer for immediate work was needed and it's been in three times this year it's funny the number of times when only when we go to use something we're realise that we had a piece of equipment that we haven't used in a while it's only that point when we realise it's gone that we haven't seen  in a while and it used to be in the field somewhere now it's washed down the river every once in a while they will want something that you know we just lost in the flood is a about it i think it had more to do with the destruction in your life the sense that your home has been threatened you know the sense of being vulnerable to that something in a matter of hours things can change so drastically i think it's been a year but there are a lot of people that are still struggling with what had happened there's still a lot of construction going on  think people are still caring about each other and helping each other there's still a few residences that are doing a lot of major construction that were from menacingly affected and there is one property that still is that the home was destroyed and there in the process of still more paperwork to clear things up richmond in particular and this is true for the whole state what we're finding now it died say eighty to eighty five percent of the folks who work with are are ok they have a support system they have put some mechanism in into place to help them cope and move forward that fifteen percent of folks that we're working with are in a place where they have a lot a lot and need that because it's almost a year now and those needs haven't been met as you can imagine the stress is even more increased so you know the physical damage is very obvious the emotional damage isn't definitely compared to last year at this time i think we're more prepared than we were and we could probably be even more in the future we're still vulnerable in many of the ways that we were before i read all of our water and s infrastructure is still in the flood plain because it's so massive and so expensive it's not likely to be moved but we were happy with the response so we got and we were able to help people but we could have done better if we you know had had a more organized response in place just at the last select board meeting we do the major step in that direction with the creation of a merge with the planning committee so one of the things i got through the military was a couple humvees emergency response there needs to be more communication from the south so from barry montpelier all the way to here this where the water came from and it collected in cold in here but then there was a lot of talk of dams being and and quite yeah the whole experience belongs in a different category than the normal everyday in that category was this really sucks but within that this really sucks category we're at the there's people that didn't get help sometimes show i'm hoping the next flood is in a hundred years and i'll be long gone but if not i do have flood insurance now and i think the next time if i ever hear that they're talking about it i would just evacuated just simply one of the things my my son said because he did he didn't want to go back to school and he was supposed to go back two days later and i needed him to go because basically i could barely deal with everything and i wanted one less kid to to worry about and one of the things i said well jared at least you have a place to live and he said mom that's not funny maybe i should just stay here and a couple of weeks later when i spoke to him and he was all settled in  said you know mom i kept saying no i never want you to sell the house because that's where i grew up he said but that was too much she said i don't really care about the house as long as we're ok yeah you're right it really does all of this stuff doesn't matter material things just it doesn't matter as long as we're together i don't know how equitable in many ways the recovery of the flood really was so i just i just have this sense that people have means got six better and faster and people without resources didn't quite get it that way i hope it was a good lesson for vermont because i know a lot of vermonters they decided to be very much strong and they really owned that and i think i hope it helped a lot of vermonters too who didn't see any of the damage or who didn't experience any of it realize that even though things may be fine in your own backyard that there are people with significant mean next door a lot of things don't go back to just the way it was before as if it never happened it becomes an event that everybody has a perspective on it probably has changed some people's views permanently of perhaps where they live or you know what should happen in a town or you know where we should you know be building or not building or what should happen in different places they always say well you find out who your friends