Neighbors dig out in Hancock following torrential rain

Updated at 6:32 p.m.

HANCOCK — Members of the Massucco family went out for dinner Thursday night. By the time they got back home, their driveway had disappeared.

“We’ve been here for multiple floods. Never like this,” Dan Massucco, the family patriarch, said from beside his flooded driveway on Friday morning.

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In the midst of Thursday’s torrential downpour, which dumped up to 6 inches of rain in parts of Addison County, a landslide had filled a 6-foot diameter culvert under the Massuccos’ driveway with debris, Massucco said. Tucker Brook had no other option but to change course.

At 11:30 a.m. Friday, the brook still flowed where a driveway had been. No water spilled from the culvert — the brook had carved a new path. Unable to access their house from their own land, the Massuccos trekked to a neighbor’s home uphill, avoiding a treacherous river crossing.

Dan and his adult sons James and Ben worked to salvage what they could on Friday. A neatly stacked cord of wood washed away, logs scattered like breadcrumbs downstream. The three men worked to move a small firewood shed, shifted precariously by flood waters, to higher ground.

On Friday, it awoke to some of the greatest impacts from torrential rain across the region the night before, according to Vermont Emergency Management spokesperson Mark Bosma.

Hancock Fire Chief Jacques Veilleux told WCAX that the aftermath included some 200 campers becoming stranded at Texas Falls, a recreation area owned by the U.S. Forest Service. Attempts to reach Veilleux were unsuccessful.

Ethan Ready, public affairs officer with the U.S. Forest Service in Vermont, said early Friday evening that officials are aware of a “Rainbow Family” gathering at Texas Falls but have not heard of any issues other than an earlier washout on Texas Falls Roads, which leads into the forest.

“What we found was there are people in that area who can’t get out due to road damage,” Bosma said Friday evening.

At about 2 p.m., two people who said they were making their way to the Rainbow gathering at Texas Falls had stopped at the corner of routes 125 and 100 because 125 was closed. (Rainbow gatherings are typically loosely organized, informal events held in the woods among people promoting peace, though they sometimes elicit concern from officials about impacts to natural resources and surrounding towns.)

The two people — who went by the names Scooby Doo and Sparrow — said they had caught the first half of Dead & Company’s final tour before Sparrow’s school bus broke down in Alabama. This week they had traveled from Maine and spent the prior night camping elsewhere.

The duo had heard from two friends on Thursday night who were waiting for them at Texas Falls, estimating that dozens of people were there.

They were looking for dog food for their dog, Bhala, and thought they might have to try Killington or Middlebury.

Uphill from the Massuccos’ home, Tucker Brook had washed out the road where it met Shampeny Hill. A group of neighbors, stranded, surveyed the damage.

Meanwhile, Charlie Smith, an excavator, trucked loads of material to the washout in an effort to make the road passable.

“I’m trying to make it so people can get home, get groceries, go back to work,” he said. “It feels good to help people. That’s what we do.”

For Smith, the latest storm began with news that flood water had surrounded some of his equipment. He salvaged the gear Thursday night with minimal damage.

“This morning my dad called me at 5:30 and said ‘let’s get going,’” Smith recalled. He expected to go road by road throughout the day.

As Tucker Brook cascaded downhill, it reached Route 125, a major state road connecting Hancock to Middlebury. On both sides of the Middlebury Gap, flood damage had closed the road, but around 10:30 a.m. Friday, state Agency of Transportation workers in Hancock said they expected to open 125 back up “in a few hours.”

A small culvert allowed Tucker Brook — typically a trickle, neighbors said — to flow underneath 125. The water emptied not into a ditch or stream, but into the yard of Jeannette Bair.

Bair said she had asked the state to expand the culvert, as it did with others, and to build a drainage ditch when it rebuilt Route 125 a few years ago. But she said the state told her the right-of-way was too small.

The culvert filled with debris over time, Bair said, which flood water dislodged on Thursday night, blasting a hole in her yard, scattering rocks and pooling water. Her rain gauge had measured 4 inches overnight.

Shauna Clifford, an administrator with the Vermont Agency of Transportation’s southeast region, said Bair could have interacted with a project engineer years ago, though her office had no knowledge of it, and that a work crew would open the culvert after responding to an issue at a nearby bridge.

Bair said the damage paled in comparison to a 2008 flood, which had washed her shed 30 feet downstream, she said, and lodged a lawnmower into the fork of a tree.

Back then, Bair had flood insurance.

“And then we find out flood insurance doesn’t cover any outdoor structures,” she said. It didn’t cover yard equipment either. The insurance only covered some items in a flooded basement, and if it paid for repairs once, it wouldn’t pay for them again, Bair said.

So Bair adapted. She moved her washer and dryer upstairs, brought her tomatoes to higher ground. And she got rid of her flood insurance.

“But we love it here,” she said.

Peter D’Auria and Auditi Guha contributed reporting.

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VTDigger's southeastern Vermont reporter. More by Ethan Weinstein