GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
So, yes: more rain. And as VT Gov. Phil Scott said at a press conference yesterday, with nowhere for it to go, "we could see waters rise again.” The National Weather Service has issued a flood watch for Windsor, Orange, Grafton, and Sullivan counties (among others). Today's forecast calls for partly to mostly cloudy skies, a chance of rain all afternoon and evening and then a likelihood tonight and tomorrow; severe thunderstorms are also a possibility tonight. Temps today in the low or mid 80s, low 60s tonight.Here's the NWS's page of river levels again. Because if you hover on the symbols for the gauges in the region—or click on them—you'll notice they show many rivers starting to rise again tomorrow afternoon.Union Village Lake. As you know, the water is quite high behind the Union Village Dam—at 94 feet this morning—and yesterday, an intrepid Jeanne Fabrikant took photos at both ends: in Thetford Center and from the top of the dam. Here's what it looks like:
Early morning on what used to be Buzzell Bridge Road. The water's edge is on the Thetford Center end, before you even get to the parking lot: If you look carefully, you'll see the signpost at the far end of the lot.
And early afternoon from the roadway along the top of the dam.
But hey, it's also time to catch up on loons and bird life.
On his latest blog post from Newbury, VT (pre-flood), Ian Clark reports the loon chicks are growing, thanks to a steady diet of fish and crayfish. Plus, some eye-catching shots of herons, swallows, and red-winged blackbirds.
And Jim Block spent June capturing a stunning array of bird life all around the Upper Valley, including bobolinks, nesting bald eagles and ospreys, a clutch of herons, and lots more.
Recovery and aid resources come online for the Upper Valley. Upper Valley Strong, which formed in the early months of the pandemic and brings together many of the region's nonprofits, as well as government agencies and businesses, updated its website yesterday. It offers a single point to contribute money for local relief efforts, links to the State of Vermont site for volunteering, and provides a full set of links to resources for everything from food access to housing to utility info to domestic violence resources to financial relief. Over toward Woodstock, the Woodstock Community Trust's The Hub is also collecting donations to help residents there and in neighboring towns.Some roads have reopened, but plenty remain closed. And even with those that are open, New England 511 warns, road conditions "are variable and may change quickly as you travel. Beware of potential road debris, road edge line erosion/washouts, and water over the road." Some roads that had been closed—Route 4 west of Woodstock, Route 107 in Bethel—have reopened, but Route 113 in Vershire remains closed after a bridge was knocked out, as are 106 in Weathersfield and roads in Newport NH.Boaters rescued after pontoon boat goes over Mascoma Lake dam. The three people on board had hoped to go fishing, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the Valley News, but "a rush of water near the dam pulled the boat sideways and then the motor stalled." The current there is much stronger than usual, the Lebanon Fire Dept says in a press release, running at 3,200 cubic feet per second because of the rains, compared to its usual 600, and the boat was swept over. As firefighters were positioned along both sides of the river, rescuers got life vests on the boaters then helped them to a ladder on the dam. The boat wasn't as lucky; it was left tethered to the dam until the waters calm.SPONSORED: Osher lecture series focuses on China. In a slight change of plans, USN Rear Admiral Michael Studeman will take the stage on Friday, July 14 for a solo presentation on military tensions between China and the U.S. It’s all part of the Osher Summer Lecture Series, “China and the United States: Can Competitive Coexistence Be Maintained?”, running Fridays through Aug. 11. Presented with the Dickey Center, the series is open to the public, both livestreamed and in person at LOH. Sponsored by Osher at Dartmouth.In Upper Valley towns, it was the luck of the draw. In Chelsea, reports the VN's Alex Hanson, the First Branch of the White inflicted more damage than it did during Irene. And that missing bridge on 113 in Vershire, Hanson writes, "complicates emergency services for Vershire" since it's the only state highway through town. By contrast, a few towns over in Thetford, town roads were quickly patched up, and only two homes reported flooded basements. The July deluge in 2017, on the other hand, damaged the majority of Thetford's roads.Cleanup in Woodstock, Quechee. Yesterday, NBC5's John Hawks visited the White Cottage, Woodstock Farmers Market, Shackleton Thomas, Simon Pearce, and other spots where the Ottauquechee overflowed its banks, getting footage of the damage and the cleanup efforts. "The idea is to get everything out of the market so we can clean to the studs," the WFM's Amelia Rappaport said. At Shackleton Thomas, two feet of water in the basement damaged the furniture maker's machinery, which now has to be taken apart and dried out, owner Charles Shackleton told Hawks.VT tries to mop up as it faces more rain. Reporting from around the state:
At a press conference yesterday, public safety commissioner Jen Morrison told reporters that the hardest-hit area of the state so far is Lamoille County, where 32 people and numerous animals had to be rescued Tuesday night. Overall, reports VTDigger's Paul Heintz, swift water rescue teams had carried out more than 200 rescues statewide since Sunday. “We need to remain vigilant in the days to come, as many disaster-related deaths occur after the acute phase and during cleanup and recovery,” Morrison said. “Vermonters, keep your guard up and do not take chances.”
WCAX's Melissa Cooney was in Barre yesterday as residents grappled with mud. Lots of mud. Meanwhile, VTDigger's Alan J. Keays reports from Cabot and Marshfield that cleanup efforts have been made tougher by widespread damage to roads, including Route 2. "Motorists had to use side, bumpy and at times steep roads to reach [Marshfield]," he writes.
More than 40 farms around the state have reported being affected by the flooding so far, report VT Public's Abagael Giles and Elodie Reed. "We're at a time of year when the replanting window is really short, because there just aren't that many more growing-degree days left. And many crops, it's already, it's already too late in the season to replant," one farmer tells them. VT's Agency of Agriculture yesterday released an online resource and info page for farmers seeking assistance.
In Richmond, Montpelier, and Waterbury, restaurant owners were waiting for waters to recede so they could get back in and check out what they'd need to do. The owners of the Stone's Throw Pizza Group were planning to open their Waterbury location, which was unharmed, "not to serve [customers] but to make cheese pies and give out free pizza," one of them told Seven Days' Melissa Pasanen. Says Kevin Kerner of Montpelier's Three Penny Taproom: "You don't weep during the destruction. You weep when you see the community come together afterwards,"
In Montpelier, as businesses began to take stock yesterday, more than 900 volunteers had already signed up to help out by yesterday morning, reports VTDigger's Fred Thys. At Bear Pond Books, co-owner Robert Kasow told Thys, “We just had an army of people get everything up off the floor [ahead of the storm]...it’s just that we were a foot-and-a-half short.” They stacked the inventory two feet off the ground; the water reached three and a half feet.
And in towns around the state, report Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, Abigail Sylvor Greenberg and Rachel Hellman, "neighbors, businesses and institutions reached out to help their flood-stricken neighbors." In Montpelier, crews from an unscathed construction company descended on downtown stores yesterday morning to help out. "They were just on it. I wouldn’t even have known where to begin,” said one owner, tearing up. Church groups, restaurants, the staff of Smugglers Notch, lone volunteers—they all showed up.
Around Vermont, water safety becomes an issue. Not the boating kind—though that is, too—but the contamination kind. Woodstock Village, Chelsea, and nine other towns remained under boil-water notices yesterday, and, reports VTDigger's Olivia Q. Pintair, "pungent odors of gas and sewage could be detected in numerous floodwaters around the state." "“People should not be walking in the floodwater at all," Montpelier's public works director tells her. "There are oils. There’s garbage debris. If (individuals) have any cuts or anything, bacteria (from the floodwater) can cause an infection.”VT wasn't the only place that was hit hard. NH's Monadnock Region was, too. And it's a sign of how rainfall patterns in New Hampshire are changing, reports Hadley Barndollar in NH Bulletin. "Extremes are becoming more extreme," she writes—"the dry is drier and the wet is wetter." A spokesman at the nonprofit Climate Central notes that a historical analysis of data for Concord shows roughly 22 percent more rainfall over the last 40 or 50 years during the hours when rain happens, "meaning rain is heavier and falling with more intensity," Barndollar writes.In NH and elsewhere, infrastructure is "undersized." The problem, UNH water resources engineer Tom Ballestero tells NHPR's Julie Furukawa, is that many culverts, bridges, and other pieces of infrastructure in place to handle rain and runoff "were sized using rainfall data from the 1930 to the 1950s." Put simply, they can't handle today's storms. "Now is the time to replace failed infrastructure with the appropriately sized infrastructure," he says, as well as to "try to respect what nature is trying to tell us [about] how things should work."Expressing "feelings and truths that may not always be put into words." That's one of the things dance can do, and it's a big part of what the Loom Ensemble will be trying to convey with its opening outdoor performance tomorrow evening (weather permitting, details below in Heads Up) for the weekend-long Junction Dance Festival. In Seven Days, Elizabeth M. Seyler looks ahead at the festival, with its mix of classes (including Scottish dance and ballet for beginners), dance films, and performances.SPONSORED: It's a musical-in-the-making! And kind of a party. In César Alvarez and Sarah Benson’s incisive and joyful new work, NOISE, a group of musicians decide that society is broken, and since music is the blueprint for everything, they set out to make music that models a society they actually want to live in. The Hop brings this brilliant production to life, presented as a special engagement at Northern Stage July 27-30. You’ll need to bring a mason jar to this participatory theatrical celebration! Sponsored by the Hop.Dartmouth Health expands clear across Vermont as Southwestern VT Medical Center in Bennington joins its network. The agreement, which took effect July 1, was announced yesterday, and it makes SVMC the sixth member hospital in Dartmouth Health's quiver. "Rural health systems like ours are experiencing greater economic challenges than ever before," DH CEO Joanne Conroy says in the press release. "We know we can't solve these problems alone, but working together we are stronger."Many New England households with young children use more than one child care arrangement. That's the conclusion of a new study by Jess Carson at UNH's Carsey School of Public Policy. In a research brief, Carson writes that some 70 percent of households with a child under 5 "used at least some child care in the past seven days" and that more than a third of them "are juggling multiple care arrangements to meet family needs." In particular, she notes, the finding suggest that "even having access to a formal slot in center- or home-based care may not be sufficient for meeting families’ needs."NH, hospitals reach agreement on ER boarding. The deal, announced yesterday, aims to end the hospitals' lawsuit over the state's practice of keeping people in a mental health crisis in emergency rooms while they wait for treatment. The state had insisted it needs two years to find alternatives; in May, a federal judge gave it a year. And that's what the agreement achieves, giving the state until May next year to eliminate waitlists for inpatient mental health care, report NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth and Dan Tuohy."This thing hatched and ran away, and I'm still trying to keep up with it.” That’s Alicia Daniel, founder of the Vermont Master Naturalist program, whose mission is “advancing conservation, building community, and connecting people to the wild heart of place.” Participants do that, writes Rachel Mullis in Seven Days, through education, field study, and volunteering in their home communities. Students, who commit to a nine-month course, are professionals as well as ordinary people who love nature and studying it. There are more than 400 alums and current students; some will go on to work in the field, but all gain new appreciation and deep knowledge of their own corner of Vermont.Kind of like stone soup for the leatherworking set. It’s a safe bet that, unless you already have a kitted-out leather workshop, you won’t do this at home. But watching the master craftsman at Hahns Atelier in South Korea turn a discarded toilet-paper roll into a fine leather case (soothing narration and music included) is captivating. Take a cardboard core, reinforce it with foam liner, add a magnet catch, cloak it in leather, stitch precisely, stain the edges… If that sounds like too much, fear not—he includes two “easier” projects, which are also too exacting for most of us. But what a joy to watch them come to life.We could all probably stand to do this right about now. And thanks to Cut, 100 people are here to give you inspiration.The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Today at 4 pm, COVER will be celebrating its new mural at its new "pocket park" by the COVER building on S. Main Street in WRJ with food, music, and, no doubt, tours. The mural was painted over the course of a month this spring by community volunteers, high school students, and Dartmouth students. Here's more info. Rain date tomorrow.
Tonight at BarnArts' Feast and Field at Fable Farm in Barnard, seven-piece Afro-Funk band Sabouyouma takes the stage. In their words, the band is a " groove machine led by Guinean-born balafonist Ousmane Camara. If Camara is the heart and soul of the band, then Senegalese percussionist Assane Coly is the backbone. With his fluency in the Senegalese vocal-drum language, and his religious roots in the Bayefal sect of Sufism, his rhythms often feel like percussive praise poetry that mystically conjures the audience into motion." Gates at 5:30, music at 6. There's a tent in case of rain.
Also at 6, the Junction Dance Festival gets underway in WRJ with a performance in Lyman Point Park by the Loom Ensemble of "Tell Me How You Breathe," bringing together a cast of actors, dancers, and musicians .The festival will put on workshops and performances all around town through Sunday, including at Open Door, White River Ballet, the Bugbee Senior Center, the Briggs Opera House, Veterans Park, and Lyman Point Park, along with films running all day at JAM. Festival schedule at the link above and lots more information here, including about the performances and performers and instructors. If this evening's performance needs to be postponed, they'll post a notice here by 1 pm.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore brings in Thetford's Chris Lincoln—copywriter, sports and arts writer, and author of a much-lauded in-depth look at Ivy League recruiting. Lincoln's first novel, The Funny Moon, is just out—"A brisk, humorous story of a middle-aged couple in an unmoored marriage, stumbling toward safe harbor," as Kirkus puts it.
Also at 7 this evening, Village Harmony's Teen World Music Ensemble will be at Alumni Hall in Haverhill, hosted by Court Street Arts. With music from all over the world and 24 singers and musicians from all over the country, led by Polina Shepherd from the UK, Carl Linich and Sinead O’Mahoney. If you can't make tonight's concert, they'll be at the Norwich Congregational Church tomorrow evening, also at 7 pm.
And in case you were girding yourself for the public meeting on the VTrans project to rehab the Quechee Gorge Bridge planned for tonight, it's been postponed because of the flooding. No new date's been set yet, but it'll be posted on the page at the link whenever they know.
The fabled Canaan Meetinghouse Reading Series kicks off for the summer tonight at 7:30 at—wait for it—the Canaan Meetinghouse. The series pairs writers for an evening of readings and conversation, and inaugurating this month are journalist Jeff Sharlet, who's been getting big coverage all over the country for his new book, The Undertow, and Vermont poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, who's been a MacArthur fellow as well as a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. "I primarily write by my ear," she told VT Public once. "I write by sound first, and then I have to go back and ... press on every word and figure out the structure of what is being said rather than how it’s being said, but there’s no question to me that sound is the generative force." (Also, since Daybreak won't be publishing next week, you should know that next Thursday's reading will pair journalists, novelists, and essayists Joyce Maynard and Douglas Bauer.)
At 8 this evening, the Lake Morey Resort free summer concert series continues with Della Mae, out on the resort's front lawn. The Grammy-nominated all-women bluegrass band started in Boston, but its members hail from all over. As the Guardian put it last year, "Their live shows are foot-stomping, crowd-pleasing riots, full of the kind of high-octane instrumental skills that the band...now in its third incarnation...was always intended to showcase." Worth double-checking in case of rain.
Anytime from dawn to dusk, if the skies have cleared and you're looking to get out into manicured nature, the garden at the Tracy Library in New London is open for the summer. Designed in the 1920s by Olmsted Brothers (the landscape architecture firm managed at the time by Frederick Law Olmsted's sons), the garden originally had four beds of old-fashioned flowers around a wading pool for children, a large lawn, a rose garden, a peak-roofed tool house, and a variety of shrubs, vines and trees. It was restored in 2002, and is cared for by a group of volunteers, who gather to work on Monday mornings.
And anytime, daylight or not, you can check out JAM's highlights for the week, including producer Rick Russell's video footage of the Ottauquechee on Monday by Simon Pearce; Russell's piece on the restoration of the 1916 stage set and other work by Maxfield Parrish in Plainfield; and Brattleboro harpist Rachel Clemente's performance at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon last fall.
And some music for the day.
Rachel Clemente's playing is beautiful, and if you need to take things down a notch, you should absolutely listen via the JAM newsletter just above.
But if you're looking to take things
up
a notch, the Charleston, SC-based band Needtobreathe will do just fine.
an anthem they've just dropped to "
the humble heroes that don’t get enough credit for the good they have brought to the world."
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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