The VTVOAD Bridge Project Working Group
“Vermonters and other working together to restore local access to Vermont flood victims”
Many people choose to move to Vermont and other parts of New England to avoid living in states prone to major disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. That is because most of New England is historically not known for experiencing large disaster events. However, the summers of 2023 and 2024 and a little bit of 2025 called that theory into question. The state experienced flooding events that resulted in five federal disaster declarations. The 2023 and 2024 floods both took place in July on the same exact days and the 2025 event, though smaller in nature, occurred on July 10th.
Governor Phil Scott reported in a press release that “more than 150 cities, towns, and villages across Vermont felt the impacts of flooding, which caused over a billion dollars in damage.” This from the 2023 and 2024 flooding events.
The National Weather Service designated the July 10-11, 2023, disaster as “The Great Vermont Flood. During this time, prolonged rainfall amounts ranged from 3 to 9 inches over a period of 48 hours. The National Weather Service reported that the damage from this flooding rivaled – and in some areas exceeded – the damage from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. They also reported that the July 2024 flooding, from the remnants of Hurricane Beryl, was the result of total rainfall amounts generally between 3 inches to 5 inches in the heaviest rainfall locations with some isolated rainfall amounts reaching between 6 and 7 inches.
Part of the damage that was experienced by Vermonters included private bridges that were destroyed leaving families with no way to get to their homes. Often the homes weren’t directly affected but people were not able to get to them, in other cases the homes themselves experienced damage and the loss of the bridge added another level of frustration to the family’s losses.
FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program (IHP) can provide grants to families for access route repairs which include private bridges. Families are eligible if the bridge is owned by them or they have shared ownership in it with their neighbors and it is the only route to their primary home. The assistance moves them closer to being able to replace their bridge but doesn’t cover all the costs as there are maximum award caps placed on the FEMA awards.
In October 2024, the insufficient financial support for bridge replacements and the need to coordinate assistance for families affected by bridge loss prompted the formation of a volunteer-based bridge project working group. The group was headed by representatives from the Vermont Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VT-VOAD). The VT-VOAD Bridge Project Working Group was made up of funders, practitioners, engineers, long-term recovery groups, and case managers, all of whom had the task of supporting individuals and households in Vermont who lost their private bridges in the 2024 flooding.
The overall purpose of the group was to i) support identification of funding sources for those with funding gaps, ii) support the design/ engineering of private bridges, iii) support the procurement and delivery of materials needed for the designed bridges, and iv) support the construction of bridges.
In the aftermath of damaging flooding events in West Virginia in April and July of 2015, the West Virginia VOAD worked with Mennonite Disaster Services and the company JZ Engineering to develop the “West Virginia VOAD Bridge Project” which was used as the basis for the development of Vermont’s Working Group.
Mennonite Disaster Service agreed to be involved in the project in Vermont as they were in West Virgina and JZ Engineering agreed to help the VT-VOAD Bridge Project Working Group develop a bridge project guidelines document. The creation of the document was supported with input from the Bridge Project Taskforce, made up of representatives from Vermont state government, including the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources and the Vermont Agency of Transportation. The taskforce was set up to make the process of getting the required permits for building bridges for disaster families a little simpler.
The guidelines document provided the necessary information so that bridges could be built, with an added feature of keeping bridges resilient for future flooding events in mind; designs and construction with limited economic resources as a priority; and ease of construction by volunteer groups as foundational. The United Methodist Church and Lutheran Disaster Response agreed to support the cost of developing the guidelines document.
Initial information about the damaged bridges was provided by Vermont 211, HOPE Coalition, and others and work was done to determine the number of them that ultimately would require the support of the working group. Once the assessment work was completed, it resulted in a list of ten possible bridges which was ultimately narrowed down to five bridges that required the support of the Bridge Project Working Group to get the work completed.
Caseworkers worked with the five families/groups of families. Grant applications were completed and filed; funds were approved and received. The Bridge Project Working Group continued meeting. A construction manager was chosen; the process of ordering materials and supplies was started; fiscal agents were chosen; volunteers from Mennonite Disaster Services, volunteer organizations, VT VOAD, Long Term Recovery Groups and others that were able to assist were scheduled, contractors that were necessary to do the work that could not be completed by volunteers were chosen, and work got underway.
It is important that we say thank you to everyone that participated in the funding of this project – There were many. A special thank you to FEMA, the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Vermont Community Foundation, the Vermont Disaster Recovery Fund, and especially the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP). Without the funds from CDP, would not have been able to finish the projects that were started. The financial support we received and the strong desire of our construction manager to help each of the affected families helped the Working Group get these bridges built in record time – nine months from the beginning of the first bridge to the completion of the final one.
As this article was being written, an annex to the Vermont Individual Assistance Plan is being written so the state is prepared should the need for this kind of work once again rear its ugly head here in the Green Mountains of Vermont.