This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
PEACHAM – To John Mackenzie, life on Governor Mattocks Road was “magical.” The 49-year-old teacher moved into his home on the little gravel road along the South Peacham Brook over two decades ago. The 1840s house where he and his wife raised their twin teenage daughters was surrounded by water on three sides. Just a week ago, they were scoping out the best summer swimming holes along the brook, watching fireflies in the meadow beside their home.
But last Wednesday night, the brook became a raging river and jumped course, sending water streaming down Governor Mattocks Road. Mackenzie and his family escaped just before their home got cut off.
“My house is now on an island,” Mackenzie said, peering across the road-turned-river from a neighbor’s yard the following Monday afternoon. “To access that house now, you have to go back to the main road, and hike through the cornfield, and actually cross what was the river – which is much more crossable than the new river.”
Peacham is one of several Northeast Kingdom towns that took the latest round of flooding this July on the chin. Governor Mattocks is one of two town roads still closed to the public, and many more are down to one lane as road crews make repairs, according to Town Clerk and Treasurer Rebecca Washington. In nearby Groton, Road Commissioner Harold Hatch said this July’s floods were “three times as bad” as the historic deluge one year ago.
Groton Town Clerk Carrie Peters estimated around 20 households saw flooding last week, and said several families have already reached out expressing their interest in a state buyout. In Peacham, a town with under 600 homes, Washington estimated around seven to 10 houses saw significant damage – not including the many more that sustained flooding in their basements.
And as the little town picks up the pieces, it’s also grieving the loss of one of its residents, Dylan Kempton, who died near Governor Mattocks after getting caught in rushing floodwaters.
“The sadness in Peacham is thick,” said Rachael Moragues, Mackenzie’s next-door neighbor.
On Monday afternoon, Moragues had a civil engineer come take a look at her home’s foundation. He told her it was intact but showed signs of weakness, she said. And if the brook is rerouted from its new course back to its old one, it poses a serious risk of compromising the house Moragues and her two children have lived in for the last four and a half years.
When a fresh round of rain hit Peacham on Monday evening, it rattled Moragues. “Every little clunk of the dehumidifier I thought the earth was falling,” she said on Tuesday morning. The scare made her settle on a decision: Her family would leave the house, and seek a buyout. She doesn’t know where they’ll go, or whether they’ll be able to stay in Vermont. But she worries her home, where it currently sits, could make future floods worse for her neighbors downstream.
“My 100% objective is to make sure that this does not affect anybody else now or in the future,” she said. “If I have to lose my house to do that, then I can cross my fingers and hope that financially I can be whole at the end of it.”
Mackenzie’s family is holding out for a buyout, too. But it’s a bitter pill to swallow. After Tropical Storm Irene brought floodwaters into the house, the family sunk thousands of dollars into protecting it from future floods – including elevating it 3 feet. Federal recovery funds helped cover some of the costs, but Mackenzie likened paying off their Small Business Administration loan for the work to a second mortgage.
Last week’s storm tore out the family’s septic system, threw their barn into the river, and swept their cars downstream, which now sit totaled at an intersection yards away. Trees crashed down across the roof, and 3 feet of water filled the first floor. Fire marshals have since come through and condemned the home, giving it a red tag, Mackenzie said.
The family now has flood insurance — they didn’t after Irene — which will help cover a small portion of the cost of their recovery. For now, a friend has offered them a rental to live in nearby. Mackenzie isn’t sure where they’ll go next, but he knows they no longer have a future in their home.
“We are going to have to walk away this time,” he said.
As much as his family has lost, though, he’s thinking of the Kempton family, in mourning. He knows the family through church, town meeting, and skiing through their land. Kempton had been driving a UTV near South Peacham Brook when floodwaters swept him away, according to the Vermont State Police. Mackenzie suspects he was coming down to the brook to make sure the families there were okay.
“He was in this neck of the woods – so I feel like he was really looking out for us,” Mackenzie said. “It was just absolutely tragic.”
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