an excerpt from Chapter 4: Lessons from a storm

The blasting and digging and straightening of rivers in Vermont had consequences. Storm waters in straight and deep channels tend to flow faster than waters in meandering and shallow streams that can overflow onto surrounding lands; when stormwaters are confined to engineered channels they tend to hurtle downstream with force enough to take out the foundations of roads and lift whole bridges out of place —- just the sort of things that occurred during Tropical Storm Irene. No surprise to those who had done their reading and understood what Gilbert White, a prominent geographer in Chicago, had written more than 60 years earlier. “Floods are ‘acts of God’,” he wrote, “but flood losses are largely acts of man.”

Earlier than elsewhere, Vermonters began looking to nature to help avoid or minimize flood losses. Some of them were likely inspired by Paul Sears, an ecologist who during the 1950s chaired one of the country’s first graduate programs in conservation, at Yale. In 1955 he presented an ambitiously-titled paper at an international symposium in Princeton, New Jersey -- “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” -- that suggests that he might have a thing or two to say to the duPont explosives people:

“Far greater funds are expended upon efforts to control flood after water has reached the river channels than are devoted to securing proper land use on the tributary uplands to retain the water where it falls. This is an interesting aspect of a technological culture where emphasis is on engineering rather than on biological controls.”

In time, the idea of keeping hands off nature began to make its way into government policy. In the 1990s Vermont’s state government began laying down rules against cutting off rivers from their floodplains; the rules said no to reshaping rivers and streams into rock-lined channels; better to let rivers occasionally soak into their floodplains.

But change can come hard. In the days immediately following Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 local officials in towns across Vermont sent in the bulldozers to clean out streams and rivers. They dug out streams to make them deeper, and in the process harvested gravel to use for road repairs. State regulators, cut off by the storm, were unable to stop the surgery. In a post-mortem, one state senator described Vermont as having been “a lawless state.”

from Water Connections by Jim Rousmaniere (Bauhan Publishing)