-The Whetstone Brook runs quietly most days, sliding under the Route 9 bridges and past the backyards of West Brattleboro on its way to the Connecticut River. It’s easy, on an ordinary afternoon, to forget what this water is capable of.
Fifteen years ago this week, nobody in Brattleboro had that luxury.
On Aug. 28, 2011, the remnants of the hurricane that officially became Tropical Storm Irene stalled over Vermont and dropped as much as 11 inches of rain in a matter of hours.
Windham County caught 4 to 7 inches of it, and the National Weather Service later logged 7.47 inches in Marlboro and 7.87 inches in West Wardsboro — enough to fill every small stream and river in the county to overflowing at more or less the same moment.
By midmorning, town officials watching the Whetstone rise by the minute knew they were no longer dealing with a bad storm. Evacuations that had started the night before at Melrose Terrace and continued at Hayes Court and Westgate spread through West Brattleboro as the brook came out of its banks.
“Had we waited another hour,” Town Manager Barbara Sondag told reporters at the Municipal Center the next day, “the outcome would have been entirely different.”
By 10 a.m. Sunday, in her words, “all hell broke loose."
‘We’re 150 miles from the nearest ocean’
The sequence was brutally quick.
The Whetstone went over its banks, and every property along its path flooded. At noon, Williams Street was evacuated as debris hurtled downstream; the Williams Street bridge was nearly swept away, and a sewer line was severed.
The back end of the Whetstone Center for the Arts washed away. Within an hour of the evacuation, Flat, Frost and Elm streets were under 2 to 3 feet of water.
The lower end of downtown Brattleboro took the brunt of it. The lower levels of Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters flooded. So did the Brattleboro Transportation Center, the Boys & Girls Club, the Latchis block, the C.F. Church building, Lynde Motorsports, Sanel Auto Parts, the R.E. Dunklee machine tool shop, and New England Youth Theatre (NEYT).
Gail Nunziata, executive director of the Brattleboro Arts Initiative (now Latchis Arts), reported 7 feet of water in the basement of the Latchis, swamping the hotel and theater’s mechanical systems.
Farther down Flat Street, NEYT came through in better shape than anyone expected for an unglamorous reason: it had 3-foot floodgates at every exit. And used them.
“We had our floodgates up, and they’re what saved us,” Technical Director Rick Barron said at the time.
The water receded nearly as fast as it arrived. On Monday morning, about a foot of mud covered Flat, Frost, and Williams streets, and public works crews were using bucket loaders and fire hoses to clear them off.
Police Chief Eugene Wrinn, whose officers were working with the Windham County Sheriff’s Department and the Vermont National Guard, spent part of the day asking people to respect the barricades; the patrols, he said, were “trying to keep the sightseers and gawkers out.”
Selectboard Chair Dick DeGray, who had spent the spring managing the town’s response to the Brooks House fire, said the same interdepartmental playbook was being run at a far larger scale.
“We’re 150 miles from the nearest ocean, and the damage is still devastating,” he said.
Not everything downtown was mud and machinery.
In a letter to this paper the following week, one Brattleboro resident described taking refrigerated insulin to the fire station after the power failed and the Whetstone blocked the roads to the hospital, and being met by firefighters who found a way to keep it cold.
Another reader wrote, furious, to report being ticketed downtown after eight hours of salvaging his workplace. Both letters ran on the same page.
That some of what the week of Irene was like in Brattleboro.
A county cut off
Brattleboro, by most accounts, got off easier than its Windham County neighbors.
Wilmington was still completely cut off on the Tuesday after the storm, with Routes 9 and 100 closed by washouts and the town under a boil-water order.
The Deerfield River had exceeded the town’s 1938 flood record by about a foot, taking out police, fire, wastewater, and municipal services in a single morning.
Town Clerk Susan Haughwout and a handful of helpers moved three-quarters of the vault’s records upstairs on rolling chairs and carts before the water reached chest height in parts of the town offices.
Ann Coleman’s gallery on West Main Street was carried off its slab and deposited in the road.
“Half a life of work is just gone,” she said.
In downtown Wilmington, Lisa Sullivan lost an estimated 90% of the inventory at Bartleby’s Books & Music, five months after losing her Brattleboro store, The Book Cellar, in the Brooks House fire.
“We are planning to reopen just as soon as we can,” she said, standing in the wreck of it.
Wardsboro had one passable road and expected to be without power for weeks. Jamaica halted non-resident traffic and pulled people off Pikes Falls and West Jamaica roads by ATV. Grafton’s fire chief described near-total destruction of the town’s feeder roads. Townshend’s East Hill Road was cut by a gully deep enough to swallow a truck.
In Rockingham, the Saxtons River crested at 19.7 feet, breaking the 17.9-foot record set in the 1938 hurricane, and the Williams River rose to 17.4 feet — nearly double its 1993 record — taking the Bartonsville Covered Bridge with it.
Statewide, the numbers came in over the following weeks: three deaths on the first day and more to come, several hundred damaged roadways, 33 severely damaged bridges, more than a dozen scoured downtowns, some 700 severely damaged or destroyed residences, and damage to state highways and bridges in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The county’s fatality on the day of the storm was Ivana Taseva, 20, a Mount Snow housekeeper from Macedonia in Vermont on a summer work visa. She was swept from a car on Route 100 in Wilmington.
A week later, Brattleboro police identified a second local death: Anthony Doleszny, 52, who rode a bicycle around barricades on Williams Street and fell into the washed-out roadway and the brook.
What the water taught
Read back-to-back, the three issues this newspaper published in the weeks after the storm — Aug. 31, Sept. 7, and Sept. 14, 2011 — amount to a fairly complete inventory of what an inland flash flood does to a rural county.
A few lessons repeat on nearly every page:
• It was water, not wind. Irene arrived in Vermont as a tropical storm with unremarkable winds. What it did was turn small brooks into rivers in a matter of minutes.
Gov. Peter Shumlin, standing next to the Whetstone in Brattleboro the day after the storm, put it plainly.
“We’re not Manhattan; our small streams quickly became big rivers,” he said.
Longtime residents who remembered the 1938 hurricane — including Corrine Boyd of Whitingham, who was a girl at the time — made the same observation.
• Isolation did as much damage as the water. Losing roads, bridges, phone lines, and power meant losing the ability to ask for help.
East Dover lost telephone service because its cables ran through Newfane. The Guard airlifted food to Wardsboro’s elementary school ball field. State Sen. Peter Galbraith arranged for delivery of 80 cellphones and a mobile tower for Newfane. The Wireless Zone in Brattleboro donated used phones to Dover so residents could at least dial 911.
The region measured Irene against the floods of 1927, 1936, and 1938 — and the benchmarks broke. The Commons’ Aug. 31 front page opened with those three floods and concluded that what happened in Windham County was on par with all three.
Wilmington and Rockingham both exceeded their 1938 records. Fran Lynggaard Hansen, reporting on the 1938 storm for the same issue, noted that many of the bridges destroyed by Irene were the bridges built to replace the ones lost 73 years earlier.
• Preparedness helped, but it was not enough. NEYT’s floodgates worked. Brattleboro’s early evacuations worked.
In Grafton, where emergency management incident commander Bill Kearns had called in contractors and staffed a command post three days before landfall, crews started rebuilding roads at 5 a.m. Monday and supplies in town arrived within days instead of weeks.
“We’ve been through it before. We knew what to expect,” Kearns said, referring to flash flooding in Grafton a few years earlier that caused extensive damage.
Kearns also warned that the hard work had barely begun.
Elsewhere the gaps showed: Townshend’s potential shelters had no generators, Westminster ran out of road signs, and Townshend ran out of traffic cones.
• For businesses and institutions, the losses were existential, not merely expensive. Ann Coleman’s gallery, Bartleby’s, the Latchis, the Weston Playhouse, the Allen Brothers farm store in Westminster, the Brockway Mills hydroelectric plant on the Williams River.
“It’s not a question of when, but if, we can ever reopen,” Tim Allen said the week of the storm, with 80 percent of Allen Brothers’ losses uninsured.
Ten days later, after employees, teachers, students and passersby washed and hauled and mucked, the stand reopened for Labor Day weekend on a limited basis. It remains open 15 years later.
Not everyone got that ending.
Eileen and Chris Kruger, who could not afford flood insurance on the Brockway Mills plant, faced roughly $650,000 in repairs on a facility locked into a power contract at 4 cents a kilowatt-hour.
• The immediate safety net was neighbors. In the village of Williamsville, the 101-year-old Williamsville Hall — a building whose upkeep the town had argued about for years — became a kitchen, a message board, a meeting room, and, within five days, the site of the best cell service in that end of Newfane.
In Grafton, meals ran out of the chapel and inmates from a local prison helped set culverts.
In Enosburg Falls, 250 miles north, a former Westminster resident filled a 16-foot trailer with food and drove it south.
The emotional toll was inseparable from the material damage. “We are battered. We are worn out,” The Commons’ editorial began that first week, referring to Brattleboro going through the trauma of the Brooks House fire, a workplace murder at the Brattleboro Food Co-op, and Irene in the span of just five months.
Two weeks later, Dr. Jilisa Snyder of the Brattleboro Retreat’s Anna Marsh Clinic told the paper that recovery of the psyche would take longer than the recovery of roads, and that people should not rush or judge their own reactions.
“Stress is not a bad thing,” she said. “What hurts is not having enough chances to restore yourself.”
She predicted, correctly, that the adrenaline would wear off long before the rebuilding ended.
Almost immediately people began arguing about adaptation rather than restoration. State Rep. Mike Mrowicki, D-Putney, surveying the Allen Brothers’ wreckage two days after the storm, said the cause of increasingly extreme weather mattered less than the response, and that how towns plan for it “has to be a part of the town plans.”
Shumlin, in Bellows Falls on Sept. 9, 2011, told residents that where roads and houses washed out this time is where they should not be rebuilt.
The money — then, and now
The other argument that started early was about who would pay.
Two weeks after the storm, the late Jon Margolis reported for VTDigger that FEMA was down to roughly $800 million nationally. Meanwhile, Irene’s damage from the Carolinas to the Canadian border was being estimated at $7 billion to $10 billion.
House leadership wanted new disaster spending offset by cuts elsewhere.
Congress had appropriated disaster relief 33 times since 1989 without such conditions. The piece asked whether Vermonters would end up as pawns in a partisan process.
Fifteen years later, that question has not gone away; it has arguably sharpened.
Chris Campany, executive director of the Windham Regional Commission, has spent the years since Irene at the center of southeastern Vermont’s disaster planning, and much of the last few of them warning towns that the federal support they have come to count on may not hold.
Speaking to the Londonderry Selectboard early this year about that town’s repeated flooding, Campany said his concern is that federal discretionary money will “dry up.”
He also noted a pattern that Windham County has learned the hard way since 2011: Much of the recent damage has come along smaller streams and in headwaters, not on main stems.
Campany has spent more than a decade making the argument that underpins nearly every flood project in this region: that the absence of a flood is not evidence of safety.
And, while towns have come to anticipate federal disaster relief, they can’t assume that any more, Campany said this week.
“Even beyond this administration, they’ve been wanting to change the thresholds in terms of the total dollar amount of declared disasters. Right now it’s a million dollars, and that could quadruple to like $4 million,” he said. “So towns could be on the hook for disasters that previously would have qualified for federal aid.”
A look at the July 2025 flooding disaster in the Northeast Kingdom and the aftermath saw the Trump administration deny a relief request and subsequent appeal.
“The state Legislature provided some relief, but it’s a classic example of what I’m concerned about, where you had a couple of small towns get hit with substantial damage, relative to the size of the towns, and there was no federal disaster aid,” Campany said.
“My concern is that will be the new normal,” he continued. “And I’m not being paranoid about it. National analyses looked into it and disaster declarations have become much more partisan under this administration.”
That, Campany said, was “never a factor before.”
“You met the standard and the standard was applied,” he said.
In an commentary for VTDigger in October 2025, Campany delineated what steps a municipality can take now to be in the best position to recover from disaster amid federal funding uncertainty:
• Establish a dedicated disaster reserve fund.
• Establish lines of credit before a disaster strikes.
• Learn about public financing tools and options for mitigation projects, recovery, and rebuilding.
• Develop a capital improvement plan and related budget to identify and prioritize projects. At minimum, this could be a prioritized, bulleted list with reasonable cost assumptions.
• Use your town and local hazard mitigation plans to inform capital improvement planning.
• Give serious consideration to what infrastructure must be rebuilt and what can be abandoned if it’s damaged or destroyed, also known as “strategic abandonment.”
“We’ve been really fortunate, knock on wood; we’ve not had a significant disaster here since ’23, but we’ve had a lot of flood and snow and wind disasters since Irene, so towns have really kind of gotten used to the presence of disasters in their lives,” Campany said.
“The challenge is they’ve always expected some kind of aid and now that aid may not be coming,” he added.
Campany said that Windham County towns “should look to what happened in the Northeast Kingdom in 2025 in the event that becomes the new normal.”
There, he said, the towns “know they’re responsible for putting everything back together and getting roads passable; they don’t, at that point, ask who’s going to pay for it.”
“But they may not be thinking about anticipating things, like having a line of credit ready, understanding bonding options, having a capital plan,” Campany said. “It’s kind of boring stuff, but it’s necessary.”
A wake-up call, in concrete and dirt
For years after Irene, the town and its partners worked through the unglamorous business of rebuilding differently.
Undersized culverts that had choked during the storm were identified and many were replaced with structures sized for the kind of rainfall that used to be rare.
Drainage systems town-wide got a second look.
Williams Street, closed indefinitely after the storm, got a new bridge rather than a temporary one — a decision the Selectboard made within two weeks of the flood.
The most visible sign of the shift sits just north of downtown at 250 Birge St., on 12 acres known for generations as Sawdust Alley. The parcel spent more than a century as a sawmill and lumber storage yard, built up with fill and walled off by a berm from the brook it sat beside.
During Irene it did exactly what a filled floodplain does: it refused the water, and the Whetstone went across the opposite bank into homes and downtown instead.
The Vermont River Conservancy bought the land from Cersosimo Industries in 2017 and, with the town and a stack of federal, state, and local funding, spent years on permitting, contaminated-soil cleanup, and archaeology — the dig turned up the households of the mill workers who had lived and worked there — before the excavators began stripping away the fill and regrading the land.
Engineers estimated the restored floodplain could pull 4 to 5 feet off a flood downstream. The finished site, now a public park with river access, is designed to do something simple that Brattleboro’s rivers had not been allowed to do in a long time: direct floodwaters safely onto land instead of into people’s homes.
Upstream at Melrose Terrace, where Irene damaged 60 of 80 units of senior housing, the answer was retreat.
Brattleboro Housing Partnership removed 11 buildings, moved 85 households to Red Clover Commons on Fairground Road, and turned the site back into floodplain, with work completed in 2022.
Both projects have been tested. When heavy rains hit the region in July 2023 and again since, the restored areas held water that would once have pushed into the same neighborhoods Irene devastated.
Town officials point to that as proof the investment, funded largely through federal hazard mitigation dollars, is paying off.
Emergency preparedness has changed as much as the infrastructure.
During Irene, the evacuation playbook worked out on the fly as the water rose, and it saved lives. It has since become practiced routine: earlier warnings, clearer coordination between departments, damage documentation good enough to satisfy FEMA, and a public that has learned to take a flood watch seriously.
One postscript from that September is worth remembering, because it shows how far the reassessment reached.
When Entergy’s lawsuit against the state opened in federal court in Brattleboro on Sept. 12, 2011, Nancy Braus wrote to point out that with Route 9 closed for two weeks, Route 30 cut west of the Rock River, I-91 down to a single lane, and dozens of local roads gone, the Vermont Yankee evacuation plan had become a piece of paper describing a road network that no longer existed.
Irene did not settle that argument, but it changed the terms of it.
No room for complacency
Ask anyone who lived through it, and the anniversary does not come with a sense that the danger has passed.
If anything, it comes with the opposite feeling.
Storms like Irene are not considered a once-in-a-generation fluke anymore.
A warming climate is loading the atmosphere with more moisture, and the kind of rainfall that used to overwhelm Vermont’s rivers once or twice in a lifetime is arriving more often.
Brattleboro has weathered several serious flood events just since 2023.
The hope is that culverts sized for today’s storms, floodplains given room to breathe, and a town better drilled in how to respond will blunt the next potential Irene before it becomes another one.
Nobody who has done this work is under the illusion that hope is a plan.
That humility got a brutal reminder just this week, half a world away.
Recent video from Nepal shows a glacier collapse sending a 100-foot high wall of water and debris down a Himalayan valley at highway speed, sweeping away bridges, buildings, and people, with almost no warning.
It is a scale of destruction Brattleboro never saw. It is also a stark illustration of the same basic truth the town learned in 2011: rivers reclaim their floodplains eventually, on their own schedule, whether or not anyone is ready.
Deborah Lee Luskin, wrote from Williamsville two weeks after the storm. Water, she wrote, always follows the path of least resistance.
“It always runs downhill.”
Fifteen years after Irene, Brattleboro is in a better position than it was — better culverts, restored floodplains, a sharper emergency response.
But along the Whetstone and the Rock River, the eroded banks are still there to remind anyone walking by of a simple fact the town has tried hard not to forget: Nature always bats last.
All 2011 quotations and details are drawn from three issues of The Commons (Aug. 31, 2011, Sept. 7, 2011, and Sept. 14, 2011), with reporting and commentary by Randolph T. Holhut, Olga Peters, Thelma O’Brien, Allison Teague, and Fran Lynggaard Hansen, and Voices section contributions from Deborah Lee Luskin, Vidda Crochetta, David Cadran, and Nancy Braus. The Commons used news coverage from VTDigger by Anne Galloway and commentary by Jon Margolis. Chris Campany’s Oct. 2025 commentary also appeared on the site.
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.