 Gabriel Langbauer is the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service here in Burlington. In his role as meteorologist in charge, Gabe has worked to increase public awareness of weather hazards in order to save lives and property. A 2003 graduate of Linden State College, Gabe worked as a meteorologist with the Department of Defense in Yuma, Arizona for 12 years before a short stint with the National Weather Service in Longmont, California. I mean Colorado, sorry. Look like CA at sea out. Give a warm welcome please to Gabe Langbauer. Now, because I saw the line go away that time. That was smart. Okay, so thank you Carol for that warm introduction. I really appreciate it. As she said, my name is Gabriel Langbauer. I'm the meteorologist in charge here at the Weather Forecast Office for the National Weather Service in Burlington, Vermont. And I'm here to talk to you today about the Great Vermont Flood as we're calling it 10th, 11th of July this past summer. So, but before I get started, who really did the work, right? It's not the meteorologist in charge, not the supervisor. It's all of these people on staff for me. So I don't expect you to be able to read all those names. But it's a really fantastic group of dedicated, hardworking, smart people at the National Weather Service. And in July floods, we were unsurprisingly super busy. And I had five different people who were scheduled for vacation who called me up that weekend and said, I need to come to work. And I said, thank you. I had one gentleman there, Matthew Clay. He's got at that time, he had a six month old baby and a three year old. We were at work, we were super busy putting out warnings, calling fire departments and everybody trying to make sure the pollock was safe. We put out some new suite of products we had a breath to take, took a second to see what was going on. And I heard behind me Matthew on the phone saying, I don't care, just give him chicken nuggets. He had to reassure his babysitter that today wasn't the day to worry about eating healthy, right? That's the kind of people we have here and I couldn't be more proud of all of them. So they did all the work and I got to come up here and talk about it. Next, I do want to have an acknowledgement that we're going to talk about the science of this flood. But real people had real losses from this, both their houses, their livelihoods. And in some places it's more, we did have a death. So I don't want to lose sight of that. That's the real story here. It's really hurting people. And there's this quote from the Cambridge Market Village owner who said, we have to cover the losses out of pocket, but I don't have a pocket with a quarter million dollars, right? Real people had real losses and suffering from this flood. And then I'm going to talk a lot about how my office worked hard to save lives and keep people safe. But again, it's these people here who put themselves at risk. The fire departments and the emergency responders and whatnot, they were out there in real life putting themselves at risk. We were all safe in my office, right? We didn't have that same kind of risk. So keeping everything in perspective here I think is very important. With that said, we'll get started. So just a quick agenda. Carol did an introduction of me, but I will just kind of complete that a little bit. What is the National Weather Service? When I go out in public, I say I'm a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, and people say, what channel is that on? So as long as I get that question, I will continue to tell you what the National Weather Service is. It's a federal agency. We're not on TV. We're behind the scenes here, right? And then we'll go into what happened in July, starting with the lead up, the main event. And depending on how long I ramble on, we might be able to get to the long tail, which is the rest of July after the big flood. So as Carol said, I grew up in Colorado, in public Colorado. When I was in high school, we moved to Florida. That was really boring. There was no snow and there was no mountains. So when it came time to go to college, I went to Lyndon State College up here in Vermont. And yes, I still do call it Lyndon State College. After graduating in 03, I continued on to Ohio State. Got a master's degree there in 2006. I did my thesis on how climate change would affect hurricanes. Everything that I wrote in 2006 is now irrelevant and completely written over. So we got to keep that in the dustbin of history. Then I went to the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Grounds for 12 years. There I say we made sure things went boom safely. The Yuma Proving Grounds is an Army test and evaluation site. So they have unproven weaponry that they're trying out there before they take it out into the battlefield. So making sure that it works under ideal conditions and in real life conditions before we use it in war. In 2021, I moved to Denver for the Denver Center Weather Service. Center Weather Service units are really fantastic, small organizations, where it's a meteorologist sitting right next to the air traffic controller. So we keep the planes in the air, keep them safe, look over to the air traffic controller, say, no, no, don't put the plane there. There's too much turbulence, right? And in turn, the air traffic controller will run over you and say, hey, someone just had a heart attack on this plane. How do we get them landed as quickly as possible? So a fantastic, fast-paced job there. And then in 2022, I moved here for the job in Burlington, and the weather forecast offices keep the public safe as a whole, right? We're looking at everybody, not just a small segment like my previous positions. So what is the National Weather Service? It's a federal agency. It's part of the Department of Commerce under the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. And our mission here is really well-known among weather service people, right? Everyone knows this by heart. It's provide weather, water, and climate data, forecast warnings, and impact-based decision support services for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy. So you'll notice that mission statement isn't have the most accurate forecast, right? I think today the forecast was for three inches of snow at my house, and we got two and a half. I'm not concerned at all about trying to make the forecast a quarter of an inch more accurate. What I want to do is work with people, whether it's you guys, everybody out here in the public, whether it's emergency responders, it's a school superintendent, it's the FAA, the air tower, all those people to understand what the forecast means for them, right? Because is the action you're going to take any different, if I told you three inches or two and a half inches of snow? Probably not. So getting that extra little bit of accuracy at this point, in 1980 it might have been different, but at this point forecasts are accurate enough that the issue is communicating the risk. And so we need to be out in the field talking to people face to face to do that. Just real quick, 168 operational units of the National Weather Service, 24-7 operations. Most all of the employees are in the field, very small headquarters, and all at the low, low cost of $4 a year. So in my mind it's a great value for taxpayers. Locally here in Burlington, again 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Recover in this map you can kind of see. Most of Vermont, we don't get Bennington and Wyndham County, and then we get the four Northern New York counties. But we're the state liaison office, which means any questions for Vermont, even if we're not doing Bennington and Wyndham forecasts, we still do those answers. So you can call us up and we'll get you that answer. We did, for the July floods, we did twice a day briefs for Governor Scott. He didn't have to worry about Albany, right? He just came to us and didn't tell us where the county line is. You know, it doesn't matter to him. And then we are a federal agency. We are responsive to taxpayers. So contact us anytime you want. We're always available. Email, there's our email address. It's on our website too, so you can pull it off there. Facebook and Twitter, you know, we post twice a day, at least on Facebook and Twitter. You can write a comment in there. Ask what the snowfall at your house is going to be. We're going to tell you. We respond to these things. We're inside the Burlington International Airport. So if you have a long wait for your flight, come on knock on our door and say hi. We'll give you a tour. And then lastly, the phone. If you call that number and then you push star, you'll talk to a real person. This isn't one of those, you know, go around in trees forever that you just listen to an automated thing. You can call that person at 2am if you want to. Someone's going to be there to answer that phone. All right. So now moving on to the flooding. So leading into 2023, looking at the top weather events for Vermont. So these are the most costly weather events. This is organized by cost in, I think it's 2020 dollars, inflation dollars, right? So the number one event was Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011, which is about a, which is a billion dollar storm, followed by January 98 ice storm, which is another billion dollar storm. And then down the list, the 27 flood, the September 38 hurricane and the 1973 flood, all in that four to $600 million range in 2020 dollars. And if you look at that list, what jumps out to you is flooding, right? All of these events, four out of the five biggest, costliest events for the state of Vermont are floods. When I lived in Florida, if you asked me what is the biggest danger weather wise in Vermont, I would have said snow, right? It's not snow. We know how to handle snow around here. It's flooding. Sometimes it's ice jams. Sometimes it's, you know, Tropical Storms. Sometimes it's just the setup we had with a blocking pattern we'll talk about this last year. But it's flooding is what gets us here in Vermont. So that's really important to kind of think about. And when we get the numbers for 2023, I'm sure it's going to be in here. I'll probably be around that billion dollar, probably just a little bit under, but I don't have the full, I don't numbers yet. So it'll be five out of six that are floods now. So what is a flood? We kind of think of flooding in three different ways. There's flash flooding. That's when you have like a really intense thunderstorm. So in a couple, a couple minutes or an hour, maybe you have small streams and creeks that just rush up and then that water goes really quick. And it's just raining so fast that nothing can happen with that water. It just runs around. Then you have river flooding. That's when a main stem river floods. So think about the Winooski or the LaMoyle, right? When those get so much water, they go up above their bank. That takes, you know, a couple hours now and you're getting all the little streams and creeks that flash flooded down into it. You're getting the water draining off the mountains into it. And it just can't distribute the water quick enough. And then finally, there's the aerial flood. And this is even more gradual. This will take several hours at least. But it's prolonged, persistent rainfall. And you end up getting a terrible picture like this here in Montpelier where, you know, the whole city is under water. So there's three different kinds of floods and all three of these happened at the same time in July, right? Because we had heavy rainfall that lasted for a long time. When we talk about flooding categories, we'll start off by saying action, right? It's not actually a flood yet. We just want you to start preparing. You can get your sandbags out when it's at action level. Once it gets to minor stage, now we actually do have flooding. This is what we call nuisance flooding usually. So at this point, if you're driving down the road, you can see water on the road, but you can tell still that it's safe to drive over. When we get to moderate flooding, now we're talking about inundations of structures and roads and makes them temporarily useless. So at this point, there's enough water on the road that you don't want to drive through it. It wouldn't be safe to drive through, but once it stops raining, that water can go away and everything can be fine. When you get to major, now the infrastructure is destroyed. So now that road washes away. After the rain is gone, the road is gone too. So those are the types of flooding, the levels of flooding, and we did again get to all of those levels in July. The quick super big takeaway here, July flood overview, widespread. We had four to eight inches of rain, and you can see maybe in this graph, most of it here, the worst of it is in the spine of the Green Mountains, where we had five to seven maybe. And we got nine inches maximum in about a 36-hour period. Nine inches that's getting close to a foot. That's a lot of rain over a shortest period of time. We had lots of damage to infrastructure, roads, bridges, railroads, all got washed away. Lots of landslides. The landslides tended to be later. They weren't July 10th and 11th. It was more like the 17th and 18th. So you had all the water fall down. It loosened the soil, but it took five or six days before the road actually washed, or the hillside actually went away. And then finally, river flooding that lasted well past the rainfall, right? Because the rain comes down and it takes a long time for that river to move all that water downstream and come back down into its banks. So before the flooding, if you began, we're gonna start talking about antecedent conditions. So that means what happened before? What was the setup? So in June, the second half of June was really wet. Who knew, right? We don't talk about that, but June 12th to 18th was a big wet period, and then 24th to 27th was well. So that meant that we had 7 to 10 inches for most of Eastern Vermont in the second half of June, which wasn't terrible, right? I mean, people were complaining that their lawn was too soggy, it was hard to mow, but not a huge deal in and of itself. But what it meant is all that soil was already full of water. When we had the next rain, that water didn't go, the soil can't absorb it, so it's gonna go to runoff. The rivers are already high, the ponds are already high, the lakes are already high, so all the rain we get from this point on becomes flooding. All right, and then July 7th, so now we're getting close to the flooding. At this point, my office is already looking at the July 10th and 11th flooding, but we're not advertising it yet because we knew that the 7th was gonna be a thunderstorm day and we didn't want to confuse people saying, hey, look out for the 7th and the 10th and the 11th and, you know, whatever. So let's get through one hazard at a time. We had this big thunderstorm, ended up going right over Killington, dropped about four inches in three, four hours, which is a lot, right, and ended up washing off the road here. So we started before the event, we had lots of moisture all over the ground, and we already were dealing with floods. You know, our emergency managers were already dealing with this and we say, oh, by the way, guys, we got something to talk about. Yeah, okay, so now before I get into what happened with the floods, I'm gonna just start with a super easy overview of what's the deal with weather. And if anyone here knows a lot about weather, just understand that this doesn't have to be 100% accurate, right? This is just conceptual models here. But the idea is that weather occurs because the sun heats the earth differently in different places, right? So the tropics get more energy than the poles. The summer hemisphere gets more energy than the winter hemisphere. Day gets more energy than the night. And then the atmosphere tries to redistribute that energy, so it's even. That's what weather is, is trying to redistribute energy from the sun to make it even all around the globe. One way we like to conceptualize how that happens is through these pressure gradients. So we have what we call long waves, which are large, slow differences in pressure that travel across the globe, redistributing that heat over a period of weeks to months. So a long wave, I don't know if you guys can see this at all, but think of an ocean wave, right? So there's a trough of high, a ridge of high pressure, low pressure, you know, trough ridge, trough ridge. And it takes up, you know, a thousand miles to go from one end to the other end. Inside of that, we have short waves. And a short wave would be the same kind of thing as a cold front. You know, if you hear the cold front or a short wave, there are two different kind of ways of thinking the same thing. But it's the quick, sharp energy traveling now through the long wave. So if you can see in this picture, just off the Pacific coast, we have a long wave trough that's being amplified here by a short wave coming through it. And to the west, it's kind of being canceled out by another short wave. So you can see it gets bigger and smaller as the short wave comes through. Okay, does that make any sense at all? So that's the situation we were in in July, is we had this long wave pattern. So we have low pressure, high pressure, low pressure, high pressure. This particular high, the Greenland high, was being very stubborn and it wasn't moving at all. So the low to the west of it was budding up as far as it could, but it couldn't get past it. So that's increasing the pressure gradient between the two, which means there's more energy available for the atmosphere to use right where these two are meeting. And it also means that any short wave that's traveling through this is going to go slower, which means it's over a specific location for a longer period of time. And because the pressure gradient's naturally tight here, it's also going to amplify that short wave, make it stronger. So that's what we get. We get this short wave that comes out of the Great Lakes, digs really deep because of that blocking pattern, moves really slowly. So the cold front can pass over us in three hours sometimes. This one took a day and a half. So that's why that rain just kept coming because of that blocking pattern. So it slows and strengthens that short wave as it comes through. In addition to that, we had record high ocean temperatures this summer. So all of that moisture of the ocean kind of starts to evaporate, gets into the atmosphere and then comes up to us. Surface dew points were in the upper 60s or lower 70s. Just know that means a lot of moisture. And then what we call precipitable water values are 1.6 to 1.8 inches. Precipitable water is the amount of water above you or above one spot. So if you took every bit of water vapor above me right now, condensed it into rain and dropped it all at once, that's what precipitable water is. So in July 10th we had like 1.6 inches of rain over everybody at all times. Right now it's probably about a quarter of an inch, maybe a third of an inch. So a lot, lot more in July. So lots of moisture, a slow moving system that's being amplified by the large scale processes. And that all leads to when it rains, it pours, right? So now we're on July 8th. We're past that thunderstorm. We're willing to start talking about the big flooding events. We have come out with this forecast here to start on July 8th, which just shows widespread 2 to 4 inches of rain, localized amounts of 5 plus. And if we plug that into our model into the Winooski River gauge, we show that we should get to moderate flooding or minor flooding there. And that's as of the morning of the 11th. These types of models tend to underestimate big events. So we're already on alarm here. But this is our starting point. It's our starting forecast. What else do we have to look at? So model depictions, right? The July 9th forecast period, storm total rainfall shows 3 to 4 inches on this HREF model. And this is what we call an ensemble mean. So when I was in college, we had enough computer power that we could run one model, right? You run the model, it says 3 inches. You say, OK, I guess it's going to be 3 inches. Nowadays, computers are so good that instead of running one model, we run an ensemble of models. So it'll be 100 models. We run all at once. And we say, out of those 100 models, what's the average? So the average of 100 models is 3 to 4. So that's pretty good for an average. But what about what we call the reasonable worst case scenario? So instead of looking at the average, if we look at the 10% of the models that are the worst, what's reasonable to say is a bad case scenario. Here now, we're getting up to 6 or 7 inches. And for a model 2 or 3 days out to say 6 or 7 inches, that's a lot. And then you start to think, well, it's only 10% of time. That's not too often, right? 90% of the time, you're going to fail if you go with that. So I looked this up. Barry Bonds, when he hit the record for most home runs in the major league season, he hit a home run 11% of the time. I remember that year, every time he came up to the plate, I knew he was going to hit a home run. It didn't seem like a rare event at all. So 10% tile events happen all the time. Don't get fooled just because they don't sometimes or because in some scenarios, it doesn't seem like a lot. 10% of events happen all the time. So our alarm bells are going off big time when we're seeing 7 inches as a 10th percentile. So then we start talking to all our neighbors, the other weather forecast offices in the national centers, and kind of come up with a national look about what we are thinking about weather, what it's going to happen. So we create this graphic. It's called the excessive rainfall outlook. And you can see a big bullseye here in Vermont, a high level of excessive rainfall. So what does that mean? It means that within 25 miles of you, if you're in this high level, there's a 70% chance you're going to flood. So now we're going from 10% chance of 7 inches of rain, but how does that translate to on the ground? 70% chance your house is going to flood. That's really bad. You don't want to be flooding your house. So at this point, now we call up Vermont's Emergency Management Office and say, you guys need to be prepared. This is going to be really bad. We briefed using the words historic and catastrophic. And we said that the flooding is going to be at least the worst since Irene and in some areas it's going to be comparable to Irene. And that got people's attention, right? Everyone who was around in Irene, which is most of these folks and I'm sure a lot of you know how bad that was. So we were using those words. People took it seriously. And just to reiterate how big of an idea the high risk of excessive rainfall is. So WPC, the Weather Prediction Center, it's the National Center that puts that out, says 4% of the time we're going to use a high risk. So only 4% of the days are going to have a high risk, but they account for 40% of all fatalities and 90% of all damage related to floods. So if you're in a high risk, you need to be doing everything you can to mitigate because it's coming. So then on July 8th, now we put out our first flood watch. Two days before a raindrop falls. So great time now to talk about what a watch is versus a warning. You get those on your phone or whatever a lot. A watch is the ingredients are there. A warning is it is happening right now. So a pancake watch is you have the ingredients. You have your eggs, your flour, your milk, cream, whatever it is. You're ready to go. You have everything you need to make a pancake, but you don't have a pancake. When you move into pancake warning, you're ready to eat, right? It's here. So the same thing with flood. You have a flood watch, that's saying we have the ingredients, right? We had that blocking high. We had that shortwave coming through. We had all that ample moisture from the Atlantic. We had everything we needed, but it wasn't there yet. So that's on July 8th we're saying it's a watch. We got 24 or 48 hours still before we get to the warning. All right. So then the official forecast. This is on the 9th. So now we're 24 hours out. We're showing kind of three to five on the morning of the 9th. By the evening, we're at four to six. So in 12 hours now as we're getting really close, we're still going up and up and up. Every run of the model, everything we see indicates the flooding can get worse. So now we're saying five inches in Rutland, five inches in Chelsea, three and a half here in Burlington, lots and lots of rain, but not just over a localized area over the whole state. So now we're coordinating directly with the emergency managers. We talked with Governor Phil Scott and he agreed to put out a state of emergency declaration. And that was the real key moment for the whole thing because that allowed the state of Vermont to bring in outside resources. So we had teams coming from North Carolina and from Michigan who could rapidly mobilize swift water rescue. So those are the people who get on a little boat and go downtown Montpelier on a boat to pick you out of your house because it's flooding. Those were the real heroes in my book. They got people out. They got people safe. And I'm so glad we were able to do that. So now we're putting our message out on Facebook, on Twitter, everything we can. It's being amplified. You can see there, Governor Phil Scott tweeting us. And we're looking at the Winooski River now. Our forecast is going to 23 feet above sea level for Winooski River. The record, I don't have that here, but the record is about 21 feet. So we're forecasting record high levels. And again, what does that mean? If I tell you it's going to flood to 23 feet above sea level, what does that mean? It's summarized really well. If we hit 23 feet, that means downtown Montpelier is five feet under water. That's what we care about. It's not whether it's 23 feet at the river. It's what's happening in the city, what's happening at your house. So making that message clear was really important. All right, then the main event comes in after the July 9th. We have some isolated thunderstorms develop across south and central Vermont. Our first flash flood warnings issued at 3.13 p.m. Excuse me. So now that means again, the warning, it's on the ground, it's happening. There is flooding occurring. The flash flood, right, these are the small streams, small creeks that are just rising so rapidly. And at this point, we're seeing rain and fall amounts of one and a half to three inches by evening. Flooding starts then on July 10th. First reports of catastrophic flooding in Windsor and Rutland counties. The systems continue to move northward along with the heavy rain and the flooding follows it. Flash flooding starts to give away to aerial flooding. So remember, aerial flooding is the whole wide area. The city is flooding now. And the Winooski and the Lamoille are particularly hard hit. So just looking quickly at the Winooski River. So here's three different gauges we have on the Winooski to see what the flooding is. At Montpelier, we get to 21.3 feet. Not quite as bad as our 23-foot forecast, but still three feet underwater for the city of Montpelier. Not good. Second only to 1927. The Winooski at Essex, 23 feet again. This time, the record is 51 there, you see, in 1927. And that tells you something kind of weird, right? We're only half of the record despite all of this. So then you go back in the records and you look, 1927, we didn't have dams. So this is all the 27 records will never happen, right? We'll never get to 50 feet. In fact, the USGS has taken that off their tables because it's just not going to happen. We have too much flood control now. But getting to 23 with the dams is just impressive. And then here in Waterbury, 426, second best ever or second worst ever. So you can see maybe the bold ones are Irene. So in both Essex and Montpelier, we had higher floods on Winooski than Irene. Here in Waterbury, just a little bit under. Other major rivers that flooded the Otter Creek, crested at 16.36, well into major, the Otter Creek was particularly problematic because it never went down. It was flooded into major for like five days. So anyone in the Rutland area was dealing with that water for a long, long time, even if it wasn't quite as high as Montpelier was. Lemoyle at Johnson, you can see we got to 21 feet second on record, well above major, right? The major flood starts at 15 feet, so we're six feet above washing the road away. And then here, the White River at West Hartford gets into moderate as well. It's sixth highest on record. So widespread throughout the entire state we're seeing these really devastating floods. Just a few more, right? Lemoyle River at Jeffersonville, that's the wrong way bridge right there. That beats out its record. The Missiscoe at North Troy, peaks out at 13 when the record's 14 and a half. And Dog River at Northfield Falls, again gets into major at, it looks like about 12 when the major starts at 11. So a foot above where we're starting to wash away roads. All right, so then July 11th comes, and I'm saying the worst case scenario appears plausible. I was supposed to get to work at 7 a.m. that day. I woke up at 4 and said, oh, I better go in right now. I was driving in, and on the radio they said, the Wrightsville Dam is within six feet of overtopping. And I have like a quarter of a cup of coffee in, and I'm like, that doesn't sound good. Not quite sure what that means, but it doesn't sound good. I get to work 10 minutes later, go into the operations floor, and they say, the Wrightsville Dam's within two feet of overtopping. So I don't know exactly how the timelines work between when the radio heard there six feet and when, you know, my forecasters heard there two feet. But that's a big difference, right? You've gotten rid of two thirds of your reserves there. And if a dam overtops, it's really bad structurally for the dam, right? It's not just that, oh, it's not holding the water in the reservoir anymore. It's also, it's eating away at the foundation of the dam. So the morning of July 11th, we started stressing out. We created this emergency alert activation template that if the Wrightsville Dam did overtop, we were going to release this. And we prayed to God this would never see the light of day. And thankfully, until right now, it didn't, and it's safe now. But, you know, we're saying here, particularly dangerous situations, seek higher ground now. Usually flood emergencies or flood warnings say something like, don't move, right? Find somewhere safe, go indoors. We're not saying that. We're saying seek higher ground. We were putting out, we were prepared to put out things saying, go to your roof so that someone can find you. This was really, really scary. Thankfully, it ended up getting to like a foot or six inches of the top and then stopped there. But we were running calculations nonstop of what that change was in the reservoir and how quickly it was going to get to the over top. I was on the phone with the Army Corps of Engineers at this point, kind of figuring out what would happen in a worst case scenario, right? If this dam breaks, who needs to be evacuated beforehand? Who needs to be evacuating right when it's breaking? All of those things. And you can see then, it wasn't just Wrightsville. Here's a list that my friend Marvin sent me of all the dams we were concerned about. Marshfield Dam, East Clayus, Waterbury, Curtis Pond, Southwoodbury, Fall Mountain, Newbury, Jewelbrook. Every single one of those dams had an emergency manager or a town manager who was really, really worried watching their dam possibly collapse. Some of these sounds really bad, right? Seeping around the edges. Curtis Pond overtopped and they had to get pumps out there to keep the water from eating away at the surface of the soil, right? Fall Mountain, they had to do extra large releases just to keep the pressure off the dam so it didn't get pushed over by the water. This was just terrifying. As bad as it was, we were pretty close to a lot, lot worse. So thankfully none of that happened. What did the forecaster look at during the floods? So this is the view. We have the old school whiteboard where we write everything down and these are all of the flood warnings we have, right? There's river flood warnings here. There's flash flood warnings here. There's aerial flood warnings here. Each one of those flood warnings we're watching exactly what's happening. We're watching the rainfall. We're watching what the water levels are and adjusting those every hour to make sure that the warning is still accurate getting the correct locations and the correct timings. And then we have the new school computer here with like six monitors looking at all kinds of different things from computer models to satellite and radar imagery as well as live observations coming in. So again, very busy time. So we have eight workstations available for forecasters. On normal day we have two forecasters, right? Because we don't need to use everything. We ran out of workstations in July because we had too much work. We had every single one of those things filled up. Everyone on a phone call. We had an eye walking around, you know, relieving people so that they didn't get too stressed out. You know, it's your turn to take a break. It's your turn to take a break. But yeah, so we had eight people all on those six monitors, say. So the flooding was really bad. We've seen the data, but here's what it looked like in real life, right? So Mike Cannon, the head of Vermont Urban Search and Rescue said on July, let's see, July 10th, 11 a.m., 14 teams are out right now with swift water rescue boats getting people. We've already rescued 19 people. We had Rackeroid 25 and those numbers just kept going up, right? So the wrap-up of the storm, like, you saw this picture already, but four to eight inches through the spine of the greens. Kaleas got nine inches. We put out eight aerial flood warnings, 16 flash flood warnings and 17 river flood warnings just from July 9th to 11th. And in fact, so we always put out this image for every rain event or every snow event. We had to adjust the color scale on this because we got more than our color scale could handle. If we used our old color scale, just the whole state of Vermont would be purple. It would be meaningless, right? So we had to adjust the color scale to get the values to be high enough. The hardest hit areas were communities in the southern greens, including Ludlow, Plymouth, and Weston, as well as Barrie in central Vermont. It was really just devastating for those communities. Here's the picture of Montpelier, right? Underwater, the whole city is underwater. The state office complex was blocked. They had to evacuate the emergency operations center because of the flooding. That's how bad it got. And then, you know, all across the state, you know, as far as northeast Coventry and whatnot, flooding was everywhere throughout the state. Over 100 state and federal highways were either damaged or closed by the flooding. And you can see once again, from north to south, all up and down the state, got the entire state. Countless smaller roads, right? This is just federal state and highways. How many, you know, little local community roads were damaged as well? Agriculture, before and after the intervail here, right? Completely devastated the intervail. And that's not all, right? The agricultural losses were just immense. So according to this survey, I can't read it here, 70% of farmers said their cash flow is negative or will be negative in the next month, right? 60% say there's going to be a feed shortage. And then only 30% have crop insurance. So most of those people are paying out of their pocket. The big question then is how did it compare to Irene? So if you look at the color scales, Irene was a little bit more widespread, but it is a comparable event. And different locations get hit differently. You know, Waterbury was worse off in this event. Some places were worse off. But the overall picture of Irene was a little bit wider. Poststorm, we went out and did damage assessments. So this is Emily here marking how high the water got onto that covered bridge. So we deployed all throughout the state, measured where the water got to. And more importantly, we talked to people from the town and say at what level was it, or what time of day, because we can measure the level was, did this road go under water? Because that's what you care about for the future, right? So we want to be able to change our action statements to say this is the level that causes damage. So we did that throughout the entire state, talked to so many, so many locals. And then we get into the long tail here. So July 10th and 11th, right? This is the big flood. But we had risks of flood continuing for the rest of the month, right? The 13th and 14th, we're at moderate, 15th is marginal, right? All of these colors mean that there was some risk of flood that day because it kept on raining, right? We didn't have two consecutive days where it wasn't flood potential until the 22nd and 23rd. And even then, we returned. It just keeps on raining. And again, the soil was already so primed. It was already eroding off. So this is when we really started getting all those landslides. There was just nothing left for the soil to hold on to. So July was an exceptionally wet month across the entire area. If you look here, I'm sure you can't read those numbers. But we put out for the month of July, 59 flash flood warnings, which is more than any other area in the nation. The only other areas in red are surrounding areas, right? New Hampshire rained a lot too. So we were really busy the entire month because it just kept on raining. That blocking high didn't move and it caused these rains to just keep coming. What is this? Oh, so how did our monthly rain then compare to average? You saw in June, we were way above normal with seven inches in places. In July, it was even worse, right? So in Burlington, we had 150% of our normal rain. St. John'sbury, 180%. Messina, New York, 175%. Montpelier, almost three times their normal rain. It was bad in Montpelier. So here it is. 12 inches, a full foot of rain in July. Their next wettest month is 10.6 in August of 89. So more than an inch, 10% more than the previous record. That's just a lot of rain. Okay, and I think that's where I'm going to stop and I will take questions from here. If you're in a car and you're on the highway and the highway is so full of water that you're worried about going any further, what do you do? Turn around. Don't drown. Yeah, never drive through a flooded road, right? Even if it looks like it's safe, you don't know what's underneath that water. If you can't see the road, don't do it. Presumably, you didn't drive through the flood to get to where you were. So turn around, find a store to go to. Find another way. You can also call our office and see what we know of the flooding. So if you can find a safe place to stop, get yourself in a good position, then call us and we can tell you, oh, no, no, flooding's not really that bad, or yes, that does look really bad there. That would be my suggestion. I'm interested in the function of dams. Namely, they're there to produce electricity and so the tendency is not to open up the dams, but when it's all this much rain, when do you open them and who tells them when to open them, et cetera? Sure, so we don't actually control the dams at all, right? A lot of those dams are controlled either locally or by some kind of organization like Green Mountain Power would own some. We communicate the risk to those organizations in those towns ahead of time, so hopefully they can let the water down before the floods start, before the rain starts so that it can pile up behind it, but that is a decision of each individual dam operator. I have one right here. It's been 97 years since that great flood of 1927 came through. Nine years after that, I was in the city. In 1936, where a flood came down in Maramaqueroa, conquered Manchester and Nashville, Lowell, Lawrence, and Havel, which just wiped out. I can remember the kids seeing a big red bond and come down the river and crash into a bridge. Shortly after that, St. Amos, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire went and built a dam, and there were no floods like that since then in the Maramaqueroa Valley. Now, what are the possibilities of looking at putting dams in where they should be in either Lowell-Moyle or Lewinowski? Because, as far as I'm concerned, when Peria and Barry are nothing but in a flood plain. Peria is in a flood plain. There's no doubt about that. Again, that's well beyond my scope. I recommend you write to your representatives and tell them that, because you're absolutely right. If you want flood control, dams do a good job. Okay, we've got a question on Zoom. Is your expectation that we will continue to see increased rainfall? I assume this question is a climate-related one. So the answer is yes. As climate change is occurring, we are seeing more and more rainfall. One of the big keys there is that warmer air can just hold more moisture. In the winter, have you ever heard it can get too cold to snow? That's because it's cold enough that you can't hold moisture in the air. As we warm up in the summer and every year, we're going to be able to hold more moisture in the air, which means when we do have these triggering events, that moisture is there to rain excessively. Over here, didn't someone? Burke, did you have one? Hold on. So I'm always intrigued by the fact that we have FEMA, which does, I think, a great job of helping out various parts of the country when there's an emergency of this type and a weather event like this. But it does seem as the gentleman here before was talking about we ought to be thinking more about investing in that response to emergencies, but preventing such things. And so is there any... Do you sense that there's anything even through NOAA? I know that maybe this is outside of the scope, but is there any sense that we are moving towards the direction in the direction of trying to mitigate or prevent some of these events which are going to continue to increase and create disasters? Sure. Again, that is not what we do at Weather Service. I think it's a good idea, right? I think there's plenty of data that shows that mitigation costs less than response. That's not within my organization, though, so I can't really answer that. Are young people entering the field of weather prediction and weather service? You haven't had trouble finding people? Oh, no. No problem finding meteorologists. It's a real popular field. So, yeah, I hired an entry-level position last year and we get 25 applications for one in position. It's a really nice position to be in as a manager to know that you get to always pick good people and that's where we are. And it helps being in a wonderful location in Vermont. Some locations have a harder time getting people, but not here. I'm curious about the reputation of Linden State College because it does have a strong meteorological department. Can you comment on that? Yeah, Linden's great. So, the Weather Forecast Office here in Burlington has three managers, all three are Linden State graduates. That's not an accent. People love being in New England. People love being in Vermont. So, we want to stay once we've been here. But also, it's just a fantastic top-rate school. I went there because as I was telling Burt earlier, I didn't want to be in a 100-person calculus class. I wouldn't have passed a 100-person calculus class. I went to Linden and got one-on-one teaching from my professors. I could go to their office hours and spend an hour with them saying, how do I do this homework? And that was amazing for me. And that pays off for a lot of people. Nationally and regionally, Linden State has a lot of really good high-quality meteorologists out in the field. TV stations, or do they use you as a resource? Yeah, so we have a special Slack. I don't know if you guys know what Slack is, but it's a computer application that allows people to chat together. We have a special chat channel just for the TV meteorologists. We're not trying to, again, tell them or have them tell us what the forecast is, but getting that messaging correct and being consistent so that we're not saying be really aware of this flood or this big snow event, and they're saying, hey, go out and watch this, right? We don't want that. So we just kind of do work together to coordinate our messaging. We hear more and more these days about the risks posed by cyberattacks and other kind of purposeful malfeasance on our infrastructure. Do you foresee that these kinds of bad actors pose risks in the future much to the Weather Service's ability to do flood management? If so, could you tell us what that is? Sure. I'm not sure what the agenda is of all those bad actors, but if they did decide the Weather Service was a target, we're relying on the internet just like everybody else. If they took down our internet, we couldn't get out our message. If they took down our data feeds, we get all our data from satellite. If they took down our satellite dishes, we wouldn't be able to get the model data that's coming into us. We wouldn't be able to get the satellite or the radar giving us current observations. It would be back to 1920 weather forecasting where we're just kind of going out looking. That's definitely a concern. We get 30 emails a day from headquarters telling us to be careful about that stuff. We are paying attention to it. I'm wondering if there's going to be any role for AI in what you do. There is. I've seen some tests of some AI, essentially computer model replacements, where they just kind of feed in the data and say what does an event like this end up looking like? I don't know what the success of those are at this point. I've not seen them outperform models or real life forecasting at this point, but as the technology goes, we need to pay paying attention. We don't want to be all missing that boat. No, we don't want to replace. I remember when quite a few years ago, maybe five years ago, when people started taking global warming, can you hear me? I can. Seriously. They were talking about how it's going to change different areas of the country. They said, Vermont's going to get wetter. Which begs the question, is it going to get even more wet over the years? Yes. The answer is yes. It is. Could you guarantee a nice summer, please? Yes, but I won't tell you how I define nice. Anyone else? Anything? I went up here, asking if we used drones. We did use drones in some of the surveys that we did afterwards. So we don't use them live for the forecasting, but after the event, we did have some flying around to see kind of the bird's eye view of what the flooding looked like. One last question. It's a two-part. It has to do with the eclipse. Okay. First, can you guarantee that we'll be able to see the eclipse? And second of all, even though it's a very short period of time, two and a half, three minutes, what effect does that have on weather? Yeah. I can guarantee that the eclipse will happen. I think our sky cover climatology is like 70% clouds that day. So it's not the best day that the eclipse could have picked. Personally, I'm making a backup plan to drive to Ohio if I need to. But, yeah. Second of all, weather-wise, it doesn't really have much of an effect, right? It's three minutes like that. It'll cool off a little bit. But don't have any real appreciable weather. Gabe, this has been great. Thank you so, so much. Thank you.