Were The Vermont Floods Unprecedented?
By Paul Homewood
I never managed to take a look at the Vermont floods last month, which were widely reported as “Unprecedented”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/13/vermont-wildlife-historic-flooding
Unsurprisingly it keeps cropping up as an example of how our weather is supposedly getting more extreme. For instance, this piece in the Washington Post last week:
Partisans remain split on climate change contributing to more disasters, and on their weather becoming more extreme.
Nearly 150 million Americans were under heat alerts Tuesday, after July marked the planet’s hottest month on record. Devastating downpours dumped two months of rain on Vermont in two days. Smoke from Canadian wildfires choked East Coast skies, causing the worst air quality on record for some locations. And Hawaii is reeling from the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/23/extreme-weather-climate-change-poll/
.
The storm which hit Vermont on July 10th affected the central area around Montpelier particularly badly as far as flooding was concerned. Montpelier itself received 5.28” on that day, and 6.39” over the two days of the storm in total. A few nearby sites of the State had over 9”.
These totals are rare, but certainly not unprecedented. In August 2011, for instance, 5.27” fell on Montpelier. And in August 1989, 6.72” fell over two days.
The Vermont floods in 1927, however, have long been regarded as not only Vermont’s worst natural disasters, but also one of the worst in the US as a whole. Indeed even Bernie Sanders, the State’s Senator, acknowledged they were worse than this year’s:
“I think we all understand that we are now living through the worst natural disaster to impact the state of Vermont since 1927, when dozens of people died,”
According to the New England Historical Society:
The Great 1927 Flood was easily the worst in the Vermont’s history. Tropical rains of up to 9 inches from November 2-4 devastated the entire state, especially the Winooski Valley. Downtown Montpelier was under eight to 10 feet of water.
Torrential rain saturated the state. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated 53 percent of the state received more than six inches of rain, while the rest of Vermont got seven, eight and nine inches.
The 1927 flood also left 9,000 homeless, injured hundreds and killed 84 people, including Lt. Gov. S. Hollister Jackson. No other natural disaster caused such lost of life in Vermont.
https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photo-great-vermont-flood-1927/
These rainfall figures are considerably higher across most of the State than occurred this July. Burlington, for example, has 3.28” of rain, and Rutland 1.82”.
The 1927 floods were compounded by the fact that the previous month had been unusually wet.
This account describes the impact:
After an extremely wet October, record levels of rainfall were reached when the flooding occurred from November 2–4, 1927.
An estimated 53% of the state received more than six inches of rain, the greatest recorded amount being 9.86 inches in Somerset.
The flood destroyed 1,285 bridges, killed at least eighty four people, and destroyed many buildings.
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/vermont/worst-disasters-vt/
So, no Guardian, this year’s floods were not unprecedented. And it is an insult to those who suffered and died in November 1927 to pretend otherwise.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
There is a Wikipedia entry for this; soon to be disappeared, I suspect.
Well given Jimmy Wales is a director of the Graun, you can be certain it will disappear.
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jimmy-wales
None was listed, but presumably after these “unprecedented” rain storms the temperatures dropped. It might be “unprecedented” if they did not?
It has never happened before during Biden’s administration.
This nonsense is based on the utterly absurd idea that in 150 years or so, every place has experienced every natural variation it possibly could. Perhaps Vermoht hasn’t had such heavy rain before: so what? There must be trillions of possible co.binations of the conditions that cause weather in Vermont. Many of the combinations look the sane, but quite a few will be extreme. In 150 years, Vermouth will have experienced only a small percentage of the possibilities.
Actually, I find very little variation in my Vermouth.
The following is a really good book, from 80 years ago:
https://archive.org/details/weatheroceanofai0000will/page/n9/mode/2up
I now actually know what a Potential Temperature is!
If people would stop reading propagandist tripe like the Washington Post and the Guardian and Wikipedia and, instead, STUDY some old books, they would have cleaner minds.
‘So, no Guardian, this year’s floods were not unprecedented.’
But what if they were? It wouldn’t matter one whit. The floods were outlers. Statistically useless.
Guardian wants policy based on outliers. Cos it meets their agenda.
Closer to home, in fact about ten miles from where I live, a couple sadly died after driving their car into flood water on the outskirts of Liverpool. I was so angry when I heard someone from Liverpool Council on Sky News saying that these more frequent floods were due to climate change. The surrounding area was not flooded and it is clear that blockages in the drains in the dip in the road was the cause.
You get a better quality of misinformation in the Grauniad…