After the Flood | Tropical Storm Irene

Downtown Wilmington at the height of Irene’s flooding on August 28, 2011. This photograph was taken by local resident Eric Craven, who awoke that morning to find his own apartment filling with water. “My girlfriend and I hastily evacuated and went to my parents’ house,” Craven says. “From there we journeyed downtown, where we witnessed the town being flooded from start to finish.”
Credit: Eric Craven

In the five years since Tropical Storm Irene barreled through New England on August 28, 2011, Vermont continues to recover. The storm claimed lives and homes. Businesses, too. And in certain sections of the state, entire towns were cut off for days from assistance. But Vermont and Vermonters are resilient. Communities quickly banded together and today the state is back on its feet.

Just a few weeks after Irene passed through, Yankee interviewed several Vermonters about their experience. We took their photograph and recorded their stories. Their memories were still raw, and for some, the future very much uncertain. Scroll down to read and hear their tales of hardship, survival, and hope.

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Susan Haughwout | The Town Clerk

Of the many unsung heroes to surface during and after Tropical Storm Irene, town clerks played one of the most crucial roles in the recovery work. Perhaps none more so than Susan Haughwout, Wilmington, Vermont’s longtime town clerk who, with several other volunteers, raced to the Town Hall to save the town’s records from the floods that would end up devastating so much of the downtown.

For nearly two hours, in the midst of heavy rains and rising river waters, the crew schlepped documents from the town hall’s first floor vault to the building’s second floor, piling up office chairs with boxes and then rolling them on to an elevator. Not everything was saved of course, but by her own estimate, Haughwout, who was forced to abandon her car and escape to safety, along with her group saved some 95 percent of the town’s records.

“All I did was worry,” Haughwout says of the work. “And for once my worrying paid off because I knew something had to be done and I made the decision to go get it done. I called a bunch of people to help me. If they hadn’t come, this wouldn’t have happened.” And the consequences for that, she says, would have been detrimental to the town. “The buying and selling and financing of real estate would have come to a halt. If you can’t provide title, you can’t do business. You gotta have it. These are critical documents for the economy of any Vermont town.”

George & Jan Knowles | The Volunteers