A devastating flood just struck your community. Neighbors’ homes are underwater. Roads are washed out.
You want to help. But what exactly do you do?
A new online manual provides some of the answers.
Volunteers who helped rebuild communities after the summer floods of 2023 and 2024 have spent more than a year developing a “resiliency toolkit” for Vermonters who find themselves at the epicenter of future disasters.
Meghan Wayland works at Northeast Kingdom Organizing, which played a lead role in flood recovery work in Orleans, Caledonia and Essex counties. In 2023, Wayland recalled, local volunteers were pretty much making it up as they went along.
“And all of those people got together and said, ‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’” they said. “We’re the people on the ground. What would it take for us to put a resource together so that nobody has to be in this position again?”
The toolkit’s creators say it’s most effective when used in advance of a disaster. There are modules on how to put together preparedness toolkits: several days of water, non-perishable food, can opener, first aid kit, a whistle to signal for help, among other items. There’s also a how-to on compiling a mutual aid network, including liability waiver forms for volunteers.
“It’s about shifting away from the assumption that somebody’s going to come save us and building our own skills to take care of each other.”Meghan Wayland, Northeast Kingdom Organizing
Lena Greenberg is with Community Resilience Organizations, the nonprofit that spearheaded the technical development of the toolkit and convened the recovery experts who created it. Greenberg described the toolkit as a user-friendly repository of “all of the information that is the sum of our lived experience in response to flooding.”
“And also what we could do beforehand so people who are not in official jobs, or not necessarily disaster preparedness experts, can get together and say, ‘Let’s get as ready as we can because we know that disaster is going to keep coming for our communities,’” Greenberg said.
The toolkit’s utility extends to the disaster itself. There’s a step-by-step guide on how to muck out a flooded home, for example, from the number of volunteers needed to the number of contractor bags and N95 masks that should be on hand.
There’s also information on the different types of pumps that should be used to remove water from a basement, and why not to do it too quickly. (You might cause the foundation to cave in if you oversaturate the soil around it.)
“I feel hopeful that the toolkit is just what a lot of communities need to build their own preparedness, but also their own ability to stand up for themselves and their communities as they are,” Wayland said. “It’s about shifting away from the assumption that somebody’s going to come save us and building our own skills to take care of each other.”
A spokesperson at Vermont Emergency Management said the toolkit has the state’s endorsement.
“This is a good resource for communities and individuals,” said Mark Bosma, the public information officer at VEM. “The more places it lives, the better.”
Jess Laporte, a co-director at Community Resilience Organizations during most of the toolkit’s development, said the resource can also help communities band together to address broader resilience measures, such as the restoration of floodplains, or safe housing for residents on the economic margins.
“The toolkit is about really engaging a much broader set of people in this project of localized resilience,” Laporte said. “It came out of the experience of people who mobilized quickly post-flood (in 2023 and 2024). And it also comes from an experience of people who are literally living in rural Vermont, trying to build the communities they want to be a part of.”
