On Monday August 29th, 2011, I sat on a Seattle runway with my 5-year-old daughter next to me and my 20-month-old son on my lap in the middle seat of an overbooked airplane. Normally I’d dread the impending 6-hour flight, but that day I was grateful. Boston’s Logan Airport, where we’d land, had just reopened after tropical storm Irene.
I had talked to my husband who reported damage in our town of Plainfield, New Hampshire, but he was safe and our home remained intact. Next to me, a businessman watched YouTube footage of water gushing through the middle of the Quechee bridge on his iPad.
“That’s 20 minutes from my house,” I told him.
At the same time, Cathy Geiger sat at a computer screen in Germany, also watching flooding videos on YouTube. Irene-related flooding had hit Geiger’s West Hartford village, located between the Ottaquechee and White Rivers, and she’d been trying to call her husband Hans and 9-year-old daughter Katya. She couldn’t reach them for three days.
When Geiger, a sea ice geophysicist at the University of Delaware, returned at the end of September, the destruction was still fresh. So she decided to make a documentary about the storm that had made groundfall in North Carolina and traveled all the way to Maine. Geiger worked with the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, Peter Malsin, a climate change educator from Hanover, New Hampshire, and Barnard filmmaker and state representative Teo Zagar. They made the documentary with a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
Two years later, the 22-minute film The Last Irene premiered.
The documentary shows graphic footage of cars and 16-foot propane tanks shooting down rivers, covered bridges being swept away, and feet of muck left behind. It features voices of Vermonters like Bill Bettis who survived flash flooding by jumping on a West Hartford Library sign that was drifting nearby and paddling to safety.
The film also covers the science of how rising global temperatures fueled the storm, which dumped 10 inches of rain in the three hours it hovered over Southern Vermont.
But now, three years later, Geiger is hopeful.
She avoids using the term “climate change” and the debate that's so polarized Washington - and talks instead about how more and more people across the country have seen with their own eyes that extreme weather patterns are impacting our cities and towns. She says that local communities are beginning to understand the stakes.
There will never be another tropical storm Irene – the name has been retired. But climate experts predict that there will be more storms, and things like bigger and better culvert and communications systems that are being put in place will help lessen their impact.
“The problems we're facing are vast, extensive, and complicated,” Geiger said. “There is no silver bullet.” But she says that hope lies in small communities solving problems together, and that in Vermont, it’s already happening.
