Damage at K

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madhatter
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Re: Damage at K

Post by madhatter »

Mister Moose wrote:
Woodsrider wrote:
brownman wrote:Advanced preventive planning for a weather event like Irene is near impossible.
You pray it's simply a 100 year event and go on with your life
I grew up with science not religion. So praying doesn't work for me. Planning does. Irene should be the new standard for VT perhaps taken into consideration for new construction...just like Sandy is for NY/NJ. Our storm barriers now must exceed Sandy's high water Mark. Homeland security is mandating it and paying for it for our critical infrastructure.
From the work I have seen and am still seeing in VT, they are taking a similar approach to drainage. The roadways and bridges are much stronger now near rivers and a crapload of boulders have been laid at critical river bends.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But only if you let it.
There is such a thing as managed risk. If Irene was in fact a 500 year storm, it makes little sense to armor all structures to that degree. For one, you can't armor all natural channels, two, that's how the earth as we know it was formed, three, when you build bridges with a 50 year life span, building them to a 500 year storm doesn't seem to make sense.
it'd be very difficult if not impossible to provide protection from flash flooding in the same manner as flooding from storm surge...whole different ballgame altogether...first, the terrain; many steep mountains w a narrow river valley running between them and many tiny tributaries feeding into a more major river such as the white...( using my area for an example as I know the topography pretty well) in addition to those numerous tributaries you also have many many more ravines, drainage etc that generally deal w the spring melt...in the case of irene you had all of those tributaries and normally dry ravines and drainages become quickly overwhelmed...once the volume builds and bank erosion and undermining begin, the only thing that is gonna stop it is running out of water to flow...( the r*in stops)...it was simply amazing to see what happened here in madhatterville in just a short time...I'll dig up pics...

where I had a 12inch culvert that spent 3/4 of the year dry, water was 4 ft deep, 6-10 ft wide and roaring over the driveway, the culvert well submerged... My dad owns property next door and he has a number of atv trails he uses to collect firewood...every one of them was flowing white water a foot or so wide and 4-6 inch deep...all of that of course leading to the 12 inch culvert...higher in the woods a spot that had maybe a 4 inch wide "flow" during the rest of the time I have lived here eroded a channel 3-4 ft deep and a foot wide when it was all said and done...the entire area along 107 is a giant watershed for the neighboring hills, our property being one tiny part of a system that occurs everywhere along the 107 corridor from stockbridge to the bethel bridge... where the branches of the white converge...

all that water HAS to go somewhere and most of where it goes and how it gets there is by natures design and on undeveloped land...the river can likely handle a lot larger flow now due to the massive widening of its reaches during irene but most of those ravines and drainages etc are just as prone to being overwhelmed and eroding during prolonged heavy r*in or r*in and melt, causing a blockage and then a torrential release when enough water builds up above it...you'd have to spend millions of dollars and hours and destroy thousand of acres of relatively untouched land and even then there'd be no guarantee...


are vt'ers worth it? see the fema thread where I asked that same question...how do the 600 people in my town justify the expense of the rebuild on the fed and state dime...and should we be allowed to...in the end 107 got back together pretty much the same as it was ( IMO still vulnerable to flood) and things went back to the same ol same ol for me, others were not as fortunate...at the time it seemed like the expense of building a new 107 wasn't worth the expense and effort for the number of people it served...me being among those people...
Last edited by madhatter on Sep 2nd, '16, 16:12, edited 1 time in total.
mach es sehr schnell

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madhatter
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Re: Damage at K

Post by madhatter »

behind my house, bone dry today...

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culvert at the entrance to madhatterville overwhelmed

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trail turned stream

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water flwing from everywhere through the woods

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somewhere on my property where water normally does not flow ( I'm not sure exactly where this is I don;t recognize it from the pic)

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damage and repair

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* I guess the culvert is bigger than 12" the original was 12 I think...my neighbor had a bigger one lying around and use of an excavator so I paid him to do the upgrade one fall...
mach es sehr schnell

'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
Woodsrider
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Re: Damage at K

Post by Woodsrider »

madhatter wrote:
Mister Moose wrote:
Woodsrider wrote:
brownman wrote:Advanced preventive planning for a weather event like Irene is near impossible.
You pray it's simply a 100 year event and go on with your life
I grew up with science not religion. So praying doesn't work for me. Planning does. Irene should be the new standard for VT perhaps taken into consideration for new construction...just like Sandy is for NY/NJ. Our storm barriers now must exceed Sandy's high water Mark. Homeland security is mandating it and paying for it for our critical infrastructure.
From the work I have seen and am still seeing in VT, they are taking a similar approach to drainage. The roadways and bridges are much stronger now near rivers and a crapload of boulders have been laid at critical river bends.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But only if you let it.
There is such a thing as managed risk. If Irene was in fact a 500 year storm, it makes little sense to armor all structures to that degree. For one, you can't armor all natural channels, two, that's how the earth as we know it was formed, three, when you build bridges with a 50 year life span, building them to a 500 year storm doesn't seem to make sense.
it'd be very difficult if not impossible to provide protection from flash flooding in the same manner as flooding from storm surge...whole different ballgame altogether...first terrain, many steep mountains w a narrow river valley running between them and many tiny tributaries feeding into a more major river such as the white...( using my are for an example as I know the topography pretty well) in addition to those numerous tributaries you also have many many more ravines, drainage etc that generally deal w the spring melt...in the case of irene you had all of those tributaries and normally dry ravines and drainages become quickly overwhelmed...once the volume builds and bank erosion and undermining begin, the only thing that is gonna stop it is running out of water to flow...( the r*in stops)...it was simply amazing to see what happened her in madhatterville in just a short time...I'll dig up pics...where I had a 12inch culvert that spent 3/4 of the year dry, water was 4 ft deep, 6-10 ft wide and roaring over the driveway, the culvert well submerged... My dad owns property next door and he has a number of atv trails he sues to collect firewood...everyone of them was flowing white water a foor or so wide and 4-6 inch deep...all of that of course leading to the 12 inch culvert...higher in the woods a spot that had maybe a 4 inch wide "flow" during the rest of the time I have lived here eroded a channel 3-4 ft deep and a foot wide when it was all said and done...the entire area along 107 is a giant watershed for the neighboring hills, our stuff being one tiny part of a system that occurs everywhere along the 107 corridor from stockbridge to the bethel bridge... where the branches of the white converge...

all that water HAS to go somewhere and most of where it goes and how it gets there is by natures design and on undeveloped land...the river can likely handle a lot larger flow now due to the massive widening of its reaches during irene but most of those ravines and drainages etc are just as prone to being overwhelmed and eroding during prolonged heavy r*in or r*in and melt, causing a blockage and then a torrential release when enough water builds up above it...you'd have to spend billions fo dollars and hours and destroy thousand of acres of relatively untouched land and even then there'd be no guarantee...


are vt'ers worth it? see the fema thread where I asked that same question...how do the 600 people in my town justify the expense of the rebuild on the fed and state dime...and should we be allowed to...in the end 107 got back together pretty much the same as it was ( IMO still vulnerable to flood) and things went back to the same ol same ol for me...at the time it seemed like the expense of building a new 107 wasn't worth the expense and effort for the number of people it served...me being among those people...
The point I was making was indeed risk management. Determining the critical infrastructure and hardening it to withstand Irene plus level flooding and developing a storm plan. In this case it would likely be specific evacuation routes that cannot be inundated or cut off and education and communication protocol for residents to be able to maintain safety. Protecting everything is not possible or practical. But you can plan to save what is important. And that is lives. If you don't know the evacuation route at least to the nearest hospital, then the planning has failed.
madhatter
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Re: Damage at K

Post by madhatter »

Woodsrider wrote:
madhatter wrote:
Mister Moose wrote:
Woodsrider wrote:
brownman wrote:Advanced preventive planning for a weather event like Irene is near impossible.
You pray it's simply a 100 year event and go on with your life
I grew up with science not religion. So praying doesn't work for me. Planning does. Irene should be the new standard for VT perhaps taken into consideration for new construction...just like Sandy is for NY/NJ. Our storm barriers now must exceed Sandy's high water Mark. Homeland security is mandating it and paying for it for our critical infrastructure.
From the work I have seen and am still seeing in VT, they are taking a similar approach to drainage. The roadways and bridges are much stronger now near rivers and a crapload of boulders have been laid at critical river bends.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But only if you let it.
There is such a thing as managed risk. If Irene was in fact a 500 year storm, it makes little sense to armor all structures to that degree. For one, you can't armor all natural channels, two, that's how the earth as we know it was formed, three, when you build bridges with a 50 year life span, building them to a 500 year storm doesn't seem to make sense.
it'd be very difficult if not impossible to provide protection from flash flooding in the same manner as flooding from storm surge...whole different ballgame altogether...first terrain, many steep mountains w a narrow river valley running between them and many tiny tributaries feeding into a more major river such as the white...( using my are for an example as I know the topography pretty well) in addition to those numerous tributaries you also have many many more ravines, drainage etc that generally deal w the spring melt...in the case of irene you had all of those tributaries and normally dry ravines and drainages become quickly overwhelmed...once the volume builds and bank erosion and undermining begin, the only thing that is gonna stop it is running out of water to flow...( the r*in stops)...it was simply amazing to see what happened her in madhatterville in just a short time...I'll dig up pics...where I had a 12inch culvert that spent 3/4 of the year dry, water was 4 ft deep, 6-10 ft wide and roaring over the driveway, the culvert well submerged... My dad owns property next door and he has a number of atv trails he sues to collect firewood...everyone of them was flowing white water a foor or so wide and 4-6 inch deep...all of that of course leading to the 12 inch culvert...higher in the woods a spot that had maybe a 4 inch wide "flow" during the rest of the time I have lived here eroded a channel 3-4 ft deep and a foot wide when it was all said and done...the entire area along 107 is a giant watershed for the neighboring hills, our stuff being one tiny part of a system that occurs everywhere along the 107 corridor from stockbridge to the bethel bridge... where the branches of the white converge...

all that water HAS to go somewhere and most of where it goes and how it gets there is by natures design and on undeveloped land...the river can likely handle a lot larger flow now due to the massive widening of its reaches during irene but most of those ravines and drainages etc are just as prone to being overwhelmed and eroding during prolonged heavy r*in or r*in and melt, causing a blockage and then a torrential release when enough water builds up above it...you'd have to spend billions fo dollars and hours and destroy thousand of acres of relatively untouched land and even then there'd be no guarantee...


are vt'ers worth it? see the fema thread where I asked that same question...how do the 600 people in my town justify the expense of the rebuild on the fed and state dime...and should we be allowed to...in the end 107 got back together pretty much the same as it was ( IMO still vulnerable to flood) and things went back to the same ol same ol for me...at the time it seemed like the expense of building a new 107 wasn't worth the expense and effort for the number of people it served...me being among those people...
The point I was making was indeed risk management. Determining the critical infrastructure and hardening it to withstand Irene plus level flooding and developing a storm plan. In this case it would likely be specific evacuation routes that cannot be inundated or cut off and education and communication protocol for residents to be able to maintain safety. Protecting everything is not possible or practical. But you can plan to save what is important. And that is lives. If you don't know the evacuation route at least to the nearest hospital, then the planning has failed.
well I thin we succeeded on the lives saved thing...on the other stuff, you can try I suppose but like I said all that water HAS to go somewhere ( the river) and perhaps the river is wide enough now to handle the volume....but that was the result of irene itself not the recovery or future prevention effort....

in regards to fema and standards, govt is a lot like farming, you can do it almost anywhere but the way you do it differs greatly from one area to the other, same fema( a branch of govt...)
mach es sehr schnell

'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
Woodsrider
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Re: Damage at K

Post by Woodsrider »

The government may be able to foot part of the bill, but local private business is always best at executing the work. As part of the Sandy recovery effort I can tell you first hand the extraordinary efforts local business and their workers went through to help their neighbors. All FEMA could do is promise to write checks.

It was also primarily the businesses that choose to re-engineer their plants. Some were forced to. But the vast majority did it because of risk management. Going down for that long is just too expensive.
brownman
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Re: Damage at K

Post by brownman »

Woodsrider wrote:
brownman wrote:Advanced preventive planning for a weather event like Irene is near impossible.
You pray it's simply a 100 year event and go on with your life :like

:Toast
I grew up with science not religion. So praying doesn't work for me. Planning does. Irene should be the new standard for VT just like Sandy is for NY/NJ. Our storm barriers now must exceed Sandy's high water Mark, which was much higher than the 100 year storm level. Homeland security is mandating it and paying for it for our critical infrastructure.
From the work I have seen and am still seeing in VT, they are taking a similar approach to drainage. The roadways and bridges are much stronger now near rivers and a crapload of boulders have been laid at critical river bends.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But only if you let it.
No planning in the world other than full-on advanced replacement could have prevented what happened with Irene. It's just not feasible to entirely close off a major thorofare to bring things up to today's standards. Unless you were directly impacted by Irene, you have no appreciation for the volume of water that bitch deposited. People on higher ground were only slightly inconvenienced. Those of us with property on major waterways were overwhelmed. The infrastructure along Rt 107 last faced an event of this magnitude when the Peavine railway was destroyed by flood in 1927. One can still see portions of RR trestle at Stony Brook. Civil Engineering and highway design have come a long way since these valley roads were originally constructed along bottomland adjacent to a main waterway. Today's standards do reflect improved drainage and structural elements. That's a natural consequence of technology advancement. Anyone who has driven the new Rt 107 can attest that the grading, drainage and roadbed are now among the top roadways in the region. That never would have happened without full destruction. Yes, planning and standards are worth the effort. We find prayer to be a useful endeavor. :wink:

Earlier, someone posted a link to the Campground story ... an ugly one. Many misunderstandings led to polarized relationships there. The Smiths did get fully wiped out. :sad: Just down river Don Fielder (who nearly lost his house in the Lillieville Flood a year earlier) made the cover of VT Life Mag. :like The ones who benefitted in Bethel were involved with suspension, alignment and tire repair from busted cars using the 'alternate routes'. Those 'expeditions' contributed to the early demise of my vehicle. :dislike

Vermonters are generally patient and giving people. At some point in time, for many folks along Rt 107, that patience simply evaporated.
We witnessed many acts, both of courage and cowardice during the 4 month rebuild of that road. Too many to recount. With that road now completed, we are reminded how hamstrung and ineffective our government can be when it is facing an absolute worse case scenario.
We told the FEMA people that if they ever came back on our property, to bring along shovels and 5 gallon containers of drinking water.

We have empathy for those still dealing with Sandy's aftermath .. especially given the patience and understanding of Garden Staters. :-)

Here's my pic of Rt 107 at Stockbridge/Bethel line the morning after Irene :sad:

:Toast
day after.JPG
day after.JPG (143.99 KiB) Viewed 1090 times
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Captain Hafski
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Re: Damage at K

Post by Captain Hafski »

FWIW: First of all, I am enjoying my normal Labor Day vacation on northern Lake Champ, not recovering from Irene like 5 years ago [and for the next 10 weeks and more the next summer].

All I really wanted to add was that Irene was not a 100 or 500 year storm. Its more like every 40 years.

As I was working on my house 5 years ago a prior owner stopped by and showed me pix from about 40 years ago. Rte 100 in front of my house looked the same. And i did some research and found a similar storm came through some 40 years before [hard to compare as the technology, roads etc were a bir different then.

As some have posted, in general VT has recovered. But sadly, not every individual.
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madhatter
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Re: Damage at K

Post by madhatter »

Captain Hafski wrote:FWIW: First of all, I am enjoying my normal Labor Day vacation on northern Lake Champ, not recovering from Irene like 5 years ago [and for the next 10 weeks and more the next summer].

All I really wanted to add was that Irene was not a 100 or 500 year storm. Its more like every 40 years.

As I was working on my house 5 years ago a prior owner stopped by and showed me pix from about 40 years ago. Rte 100 in front of my house looked the same. And i did some research and found a similar storm came through some 40 years before [hard to compare as the technology, roads etc were a bir different then.

As some have posted, in general VT has recovered. But sadly, not every individual.
yep there are/were pics in the back behind of the 70's flood...enjoy your vaca...
mach es sehr schnell

'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
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Re: Damage at K

Post by kbroderick »

Captain Hafski wrote:FWIW: First of all, I am enjoying my normal Labor Day vacation on northern Lake Champ, not recovering from Irene like 5 years ago [and for the next 10 weeks and more the next summer].

All I really wanted to add was that Irene was not a 100 or 500 year storm. Its more like every 40 years.

As I was working on my house 5 years ago a prior owner stopped by and showed me pix from about 40 years ago. Rte 100 in front of my house looked the same. And i did some research and found a similar storm came through some 40 years before [hard to compare as the technology, roads etc were a bir different then.

As some have posted, in general VT has recovered. But sadly, not every individual.
Irene was not a 40-year event. It may be closer to a 100-year event that a 500-year one, but the big difference between Irene and those 40-year storms is the breadth of impact. Even fairly normal spring microbursts can produce localized rainfall approaching that of Irene, but Irene hit a huge swath of the state with record or near-record rainfall. That led to a much larger impact further downstream where localized heavy r*in would have been early absorbed by the capacity of larger stand and rivers. The data is clear: Vermont has not seen anything like Irene since 1927.
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Mister Moose
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Re: Damage at K

Post by Mister Moose »

When you look at the amount of sediment removed from Rte 4 in Mendon, or 107 in Stockbridge, or in Proctorsville or even Roaring Brook by Kokopeli, that was far more than was deposited in 40 years, or 100 years. That event moved sediments that likely had been there for millennia. That leads me to think (in arm chair fashion) that Irene in VT was a more significant storm than the 100 year benchmark.
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Re: Damage at K

Post by spanky »

It wasn't just the Irene event as there was above normal precipitation that spring/summer and the ground was quite saturated.
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madhatter
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Re: Damage at K

Post by madhatter »

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campground damage from 5 yrs ago...I haven;t been down there in along time, no idea if any of this was fixed in any way to be honest...as mentioned above they never re-opened...
mach es sehr schnell

'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
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