Three years ago today, Tropical Storm Irene turned much of Vermont into a disaster area of flooded-out roads, homes and businesses.
The effort to raise money to help those in need had started months before Irene, when spring flooding caused its own formidable damage. After the tropical storm, millions more dollars were raised to help Vermonters, and borne out of this effort was the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund.
"It's odd. Three years, it sort of in one way seems like forever ago, and in another way seems like yesterday," says Chris Graff, who is now the chairman of the fund.
Graff says roughly $6.5 million was raised for the fund, just over $4 million of which has been given away.
"About $200,000 of that goes to allocations related to the 2013 flooding," Graff says. "The rest of it is all for either the spring flooding of May 2011 and Irene."
The significant flooding that came before Irene is often forgotten, but Graff says those events are what spurred the preparation for the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund and a long-term recovery committee.
"In the end, houses and people who were counting on the buyout from the federal government may not in fact have gotten the money for the buyout. So they had to scramble at the end to come find more assistance. And in some cases that has been from the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund." - Chris Graff, fund chair
At one point the committee was meeting twice a week to make decisions and dole out money; these days, "there are just a handful of cases that are still pending," Graff says. "Most of the individual assistance has been settled now ... What is happening is that as the jigsaw puzzle comes together in the end, maybe there is not the aid, maybe they did not get the buyout. There are so many pieces to this puzzle: using your private insurance, using the FEMA dollars, or SBA dollars, or federal or state, or regional money, or the home buy outs. And in the end, it really was, for some people, not over until recently."
Even three years after Irene, some folks are still waiting for FEMA buyout money. Graff says the fund has been able to help some of those people.
"What we built was really a Vermont style response, using federal funds from FEMA, and then later community development block grants to hire case managers who were hired through the community action agencies in each region," Graff says. "Those case managers really helped the home owners and the individuals build their individual plan for recovery. And it relied on a lot of different sources. In the end, houses and people who were counting on the buyout from the federal government may not in fact have gotten the money for the buyout. So they had to scramble at the end to come find more assistance. And in some cases that has been from the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund."
The fund doles out money in $10,000 to $20,000 chunks. And though there's still about $2 million left in the fund, Graff says he doesn't regret not having given away bigger amounts to people or businesses.
"We'd like to make everybody whole, of course, but the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund was just one of many funds that were used," Graff says. "When you look at the landscape of fundraising that was done, we had this tremendous amount that Vermont Public Radio raised -- over $600,000 that came to the fund. But other people gave money and raised money for regional funds, or they gave to the special funds set up by the Vermont Community Foundation. Our job really was to put together an entire financial plan that used all of those monies locally and regionally before people came to the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund. I think that was the hardest thing for most individuals, was knowing what was available, because it wasn't all in the [fund]."
Graff says the fund has stopped raising money, and has used the remaining money "for other emergencies, and we will continue to. We will only be giving it to disaster relief; it's not going anywhere else. We're not ready for the next storm, and we know it's coming. We hope it's nothing like Irene. But even if you look at the funding of the storm in Chester a few weeks ago -- seven homes badly damaged -- we want to be ready for that."
