On the night of July 10, 2023, the city of Barre lost 13 percent of its housing stock when the Stevens Branch of the Winooski River flowed over its banks and into the streets, exacerbating Barre’s housing shortage and inflicting particular damage on working class neighborhoods on the city’s north side.
“It has just been devastating for the community,” says the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, rector of Church of the Good Shepherd, Barre. “Some people lived out all winter in campers. I have no idea how they did it. We are dealing with some of these housing issues pretty much on a daily basis, and we were already involved in housing issues.”
Ten months later, Barre is in the midst of a slow recovery in which the Diocese of Vermont, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, and individual clergy and parishioners have played significant roles. Working through its Disaster Relief Committee, the diocese has contributed $15,000 to Barre Up to repair and replace housing stock. Good Shepherd has raised an additional $12,000 for Barre Up and other organizations.
Barre Up, in turn, has contracted with Youth Build, which trains young people from urban, rural, and tribal communities in the building trades. Together the donations from the diocese and the parish will pay for six month’s work from a Youth Build crew, Kooperkamp says.
About 250 housing units are under construction or in the planning stages, and while Kooperkamp estimates that is only about a third of what the city needs, he calls it “a good start.”
Good Shepherd is perched on a hill above the Stevens Branch and did not even get water in its sometime damp basement. As a result, the church was immediately active in recovery operations. “The first morning at about 7:30, we got a truck load of bottled water, over 700 cases, and started distributing it,” Kooperkamp says.
Senior warden Linda Webster, treasurer Tess Taylor and others began putting together care packages. “We were trying to give out more things that would complement the things that were coming out from Red Cross and other places,” Taylor says.
As the recovery went on, Good Shepherd turned its attention to raising money, turning out residents for mass meetings and assessing what the parish and its members could do to meet their neighbors’ needs.
Taylor’s story captures both the dislocation and the resilience of the community. She lives on Granite Street, which was hit particularly hard by the flooding. The water filled her basement, ruined her heating and electrical equipment, her washer and dryer and many of her possessions. On the night the waters rose, she and her dog, a tenant, and a neighbor were rescued from her triplex by walking across the porch and stepping into a bucket loader that lifted them to safety.
“I can laugh about it now,” she says. “We spent the night on Red Cross cots, which is something I only want to do once.”
Kooperkamp and his wife, Elizabeth, do not live in the parish’s rectory, so they offered it to Taylor, who moved in and stayed there until Easter. She immediately began working on the recovery effort. A former member of the state legislature, Taylor asked City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro if there was anything she could do beyond volunteer work, and soon found herself working as the city of Barre’s housing and homelessness liaison to the state government and other organizations.
“We are trying to put some housing in certain spots around the city,” she says, as well as help residents to save existing housing. “There is a park up away from the river above a neighborhood that got trashed the most, just a half-acre playground. We asked the family for whom the park was named if we could use the land for new housing and put a park someplace else, and they said that was fine as long as neighborhood kids had another place to play.
“We also have some developers eyeing parking lots. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to parking lots in Barre.”
Making a house livable again takes time, however, and meanwhile a certain anxiety remains. “You think you’re doing ok, and then something comes along like, oh, a nice big storm in December, and the water starts rising and it’s real touch-and-go,” Taylor says.
Some flood mitigation measures that property owners have taken since the July deluge have helped, Taylor says. She had her own utilities removed from her basement and placed in a small shed attached to a porch. Still, she said, “we’re two months away from the anniversary, and as we get closer and closer to that I think people are going to have their moments, understandably.”
Kooperkamp agrees. “We want to have a service of lamentation on the anniversary of the flood,” he says, “and really acknowledge the deep loss that we’ve had.
“We talk about keeping spirits up, but I don’t think we can do that until we’ve lived through that loss. Then we can move forward. If you try to move forward without acknowledging the loss, you keep getting pulled back into it.”
Image: Jake Hemmerick, mayor of Barre, and the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp unloading cases of water for citywide distribution at Good Shepherd on the morning after the flood. Credit: Linda Webster