 I today. My name is Jamie Duggan. I'm with the Division of First World Preservation and I wanted to just start out real quickly. I came back here from Lost Nation Theatre. It's going to just give us a quick intro as our host here to the space. Yeah, just a pleasure to welcome you all here. I just thought it might be a good idea to give you an idea of where you are in this space. I think it's a wonderful example of a public-private partnership that's been in place for 31 years now. Lost Nation Theatre and the City of Montpelier working together helping this happen. When we first came into this space, there was plaster falling from the ceiling. There were no curtains on the windows. It was very kind of rundown and hardly used at all in 1989. And we started having summer theatre here. And we worked with the City Hall Improvement Committee for four or five years to eventually pass a bond to fund some improvements for the facility. And so in 1995, we were able to do a complete overhaul of the space. We got the curtains on the windows with the lighting grid. We got the entire interior repainted and the space sprinkled for safety. So all of that happened in 1995 and from then we continued. Lost Nation Theatre is essentially the manager of the space for the city. When we're not using this facility, we function as the manager for other people who want to rent the space. And we provide technical support for them and so on. So it's really a wonderful partnership that's evolved and made all this possible over the last 31 years. Yeah, so what you're, this environment that you're working in today has somewhat of a circuit-circuit-y feel because the current show we're performing is the History of Comedy Abridge. We're the second weekend of the run and we're running through June 16th. So if you can come back and see, as you can see, the theater in action. I also just want to explain that this theater space, actually this chamber theater environment, gets set up in March every year and then we take it down to just a big empty room for other people to use however they want to for the rest of the year. So it's a lot of work involved but we think it's really worth it. It provides the possibility for this facility to be used pretty much 200 days out of the year, some of the things to happen here throughout the year. So, well, and congratulations and thanks for all you do to help make downtowners free. Thanks, Ben. Okay, so today we're going to talk about readiness and resiliency for cultural and historic properties and I think we're all aware that there are changes that have been happening in our weather patterns and other impacts that have created situations which need a response. And in my role at the division and working through some of these projects after the fact or after an incident, we see all too often how without proper planning in place ahead of time, it makes the job that much harder to reach those goals. And we're seeing it all around and there's a lot of communities all around the country that are being dealt with issues of climate change, a lot coastal places that are dealing with sea level rise. We're also seeing it here though in some concentrated areas and repeatedly. And being able to respond is and to know what needs to happen is a real critical part of that. One of the first steps in all of this is doing some survey work and planning, understanding the resources that you have so that you can then respond when you see what those effects are. So, we've got a great panel here today, Emily Harris and Laura Nose from Vermont emergency management, Seth Jensen from County Regional Planning Commission, Rachel Onup from Vermont State Archives and Ben Harris from Historic New England. And I'm just going to let these folks get right into the content here. And we've left a generous section at the end for some discussion and questions and answers. I'm sure it will be a lot that will come up through the presentations that you might have some questions about and we hope to have a good dialogue at the end. So, without further ado, I'll pass it over to Emily. Thanks. Thank you so much. So, as, oh my goodness, your name. As Jamie just said, I'm Emily Harris from Vermont Emergency Management. I'm the Interim Engagement Section Chief there, meaning we provide planning, training and exercise support to communities and organizations throughout Vermont. And today I'm going to touch on emergency planning, which I'm hoping all of you recognize is very important because you're here today. So, why do we want to make sure we're prepared first because emergencies can happen anytime. Emergencies don't take a vacation. They don't say, well, it's a holiday or this is a very important day for us. In fact, I was in this very room about, it was two years ago, seeing a show and the fire alarm went off. Now, luckily it was just, I believe, a toaster in the youth center downstairs that caused the alarm to go off. And so we were able to quickly exit, gather, fire department showed up, and then we're able to come back in in no time. But that could have been a much bigger incident. And so, because this facility is prepared, they have prepared all of their staff to lead people outside calmly, ensure everyone vacated the building, ensure everyone went to the rally points. And then they had a plan for how we were going to return. Now, I haven't seen their plan, but I'm also hoping that they've got a plan for what they would do if we couldn't come back to this building. Maybe there's another building that they share resources with, where the show could go on, should this facility not be available. By having plans in place, it reduces fear and anxiety amongst ourselves as well as our staff and those folks that we're serving. So they know that we're taking care of it, that if we were to have to vacate the building or we were flooded out for months before we could return, payroll is going to continue functioning. We're going to be able to save our records that are really important and they're not going to be lost. And one thing that you folks need to be aware of is that resources are going to be exceptionally limited during a disaster. So our first responders are first and foremost saving lives and preventing injuries. That is always their number one priority. Next is making sure the thing that's happening stops happening. So if there's a hazmat spill, it's stopping that spill from continuing and spreading further. And then finally, that third bullet is protecting the property and the environment. So you need to be prepared that in those first few hours and maybe even first few days, you folks may not be high on a priority list for first responders to come in and take their collections out and help you out. So you should have a plan in place ahead of time. You should discuss that with your first response organizations so that way they know that you have a plan and they can help you with your plan. Because if your plan is that we're going to drive all our collections this way, they may be able to tell you well the hazard that's going to impact your building is actually also going to impact that building. Maybe that's not a great idea. So talk to your first response organizations. Every town has an emergency management director who is versed in emergency management who maintains a local emergency management plan. Have conversations with them ahead of time. So how do you actually plan for emergencies? The first step is to form a collaborative planning team. So as I said, make sure you're including your first response organizations and your emergency management director, but also consider including volunteers and donors and staff, people who have different information about your particular facility to make sure that you've got a full understanding of what the vulnerabilities are and what the priorities are. Then you want to understand the situation and that's figuring out what threats and hazards are most likely to impact you. So as many folks are aware we're in Montpelier. Water is a pretty big problem in Montpelier. As a resident of Montpelier I identify this is a very big problem. In fact, this building is actually in a flood hazard area. So you need to know what are the hazards that are most likely to impact your building and how would those hazards impact your building. So maybe you've got a bunch of critical documents and you're doing a great job about not storing those in the basement or on the first level you've got them high up. But what happens if you lose power for an extended period of time? Do some of your items actually need to be refrigerated or need to have air conditioning, need to have heat? Would there be a problem if your building was without power for an extended period of time? So plan out what you would do in those circumstances. Then you want to come up with your goals and objectives. What are we hoping to accomplish? And again working on this as a collaborative planning team. You develop that plan together. You then make sure that your plan is reviewed by all of the folks that have been participating in the planning process and that you adopt it. And then you can test that plan. You can go through an exercise. An exercise can be simply having a conversation to say okay let's pretend that it's Christmas day and something's happening at our building. There's been a big hazmat spill outside of it. How would we even be notified that that was happening? Do people have our contact information? How would we notify staff? What about volunteers that we've already identified that would come and help us in this situation? How would we notify them? So test out that plan, have those conversations and remote emergency management is here to help you. We have a lot of courses on how to do these sorts of exercises so you can do them on your own or we can help you cope with some general concepts for how you could do it. There are a lot of resources available for you. So one is who here has seen the ANR Flood Ready Atlas? Okay it's an excellent resource. It talks about the flood hazard areas. It shows you brownfield sites. It shows you hazardous material producing area buildings and this really gives you a good understanding of some of the threats and hazards that may be impacting your building. Has everyone here registered for Vermont Alert? So Vermont Alert is one of the ways that you can be notified that something is happening in your community. Again I live in Montpelier so I have personally registered for Vermont Alert and I have said I care about arcing mounds because I just do. I care about hazmat instance. I care about road closures. I care about water issues and so I told the system which you can access at vtealert.gov that I want to be texted first then I want you to send me an email that'll have more details and I don't want to phone call but a lot of people do. So you identify how you want to be notified and you can also set quiet hours. So for example I don't care if there's a winter weather advisory at 4 a.m. So I've set quiet hours for advisories between the hours of midnight and I think 5 a.m. to say please don't call me at that time don't send me a text. So that's something that you can do. The federal government the federal emergency management agency has a bunch of resources at ready.gov I strongly encourage you to check it out and then there are also courses available to you. Sorry just need to actually see this here. So FEMA has put together a unified federal review advisory training. This is something that they recommend for cultural and historical institutions to take as well as community planning for disaster recovery and that's an in-person class that we're actually going to be having in Waterbury coming up on July 11th and I'd also mentioned to you that your local emergency management director is a great resource. If you don't know who your local emergency management director is you can ask your town hall or you can give us a call at Vermont emergency management. Our phone number is up here it is 1-800-347-0488 and if you call that between 745 in the morning and 430 at night you can just say here's who I am and what I'm looking for and they'll direct you to the appropriate person. So that's my really quick slide. Thank you Emily and good afternoon my name is Rachel Onof and I'm at the Vermont State Archives and records administration and I'm going to tell you a little bit about a very new initiative here in the state very new to build a resilient network for our state's arts cultural and historic organizations and this is not happening in a in a vacuum to give you a little bit of context. About 10 years ago there was a group called The Chart which stood for Vermont cultural heritage and art recovery team that had a big forum with about 95 people who came. There was anyone there? Is it the building's farm? And again this is 2009 this was not inspired by Irene this was pre Irene. They were developing a local chapter of the National Alliance for Response Network. The trouble was trying to sustain that over time. They met a couple more times there was some follow-up activity with the Northeast Document Conservation Center who came and did some Vermont prepares workshops and trainings that were helping organizations to develop disaster plans and emergency plan that Emily was talking about for their for their repository, town clerks, historical societies and museums all participated in that but this organization had been more of them for some time so that's that's happening in the background and then in May 2017 Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos agreed to fund and get matching federal funds eventually a program at the state archives the Vermont records historical records program so I started the part-time basis then and about a year later again with additional funding it became a full-time position and so I've been doing that for about a year. One of the first things I did and in my role I run around and do site visits both one on one with historical societies and museums and town clerks. I run trainings and workshops but I also tried to build statewide capacity and find more ways that I can support these organizations. I was the roving archivist in Massachusetts before I came up to Vermont and I had a suite of things I could offer to places. You need scanning done, awesome public library does it for free. You need a digital repository, digital commonwealth is there for $50 a year. You need some supplies, oh yeah the Shrav will give you some money for supplies it takes about half an hour to write an application and they never say no. So I got here and they were kind of what have we got? And one of the things that I heard most from sites you know all about other stuff would be great but they were concerned about emergencies about being able to respond in the event of a disaster. I think that the memory of Irene still was running strong it still does. So that I was getting that that kind of feedback from the sites I visited and then the Mellon Foundation was making money available through the Performing Arts Readiness Project for starting up emergency preparedness and response networks that would involve performing arts organizations. So I applied for and got some funding to develop a network here in Vermont. I was thrilled to have the Vermont Arts Council Michelle Bailey and Amy Cunningham and my co-leads on this project. We used the funding to bring in a really talented facilitator Mary Margaret Schoenfeld and we've had three organizing meetings so far and have been using a guide called the Cultural Placekeeping Guide that came out from the Americans from the Arts. That's been kind of our our our primer for how to go through this process and we finally finally came up with a name at this last meeting last week. It's not awesome but back darn! But it was important and I will say that this we had a wonderful group of stakeholders at these meetings including folks from Vermont emergency management from arts organizations from historical records repositories trying to put out as big an umbrella as we could and we intend to work with individual studio artists as well as we move forward with this initiative. So it was important we decided this meeting to have resilience in the name that was kind of one of the things that came out and what prompted this particular acronym actually is something you can say which was challenging with all the different words we were trying to get into the name and we've really been focusing on what our what our network actions will be and when we're going to when we're going to be active. We're still working on how we're going to be structured there's probably going to be a steering committee and some co-chairs we'll probably continue on in that role at least for the short term and we intend to operate year round with regular communication in down times as well as in the lead up and after disasters. During disasters we plan to stay out of the way and let the first responders and Vermont emergency management do what they need to do and make sure everyone is safe and as Emily was saying there is a recognition and acknowledgement that the repositories the materials the historic sites are not necessarily going to be top priority but one thing we hope to do as a network is to help you be better prepared in the event of these disasters happening and to facilitate quick recovery as soon as you do get the green light to be able to enter those spaces again. The intent for communication among members which is a really important part of this network is that will maintain contact lists at the member level so they'll push things out push out information to their people who are on their lists so we won't have any one master list but Department of Libraries, Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Historical Society will all push out communication to their listeners that they're maintaining anyway. We will promote existing training things like what Vermont emergency management offers all the time wonderful trainings as well as develop more collections oriented trainings of our own and I've done some of that already with with some organizations around the state helping them both with awareness of what they can do developing risk assessments developing disaster plans so that stuff that again my program offers for free to communities so please talk to me after if you're interested. We'll have a website coming soon where we'll have curated information available as well as offer a space for folks to share information with each other that kind of lateral learning that was evoked in an earlier session today. We also want to promote the role of arts and culture organizations after a disaster and how they can help build their communities back up help them heal help them become more resilient and often after such an event the artists are some of the first to step forward and say I'll do a benefit concert or let's get some art going here or let's let's this is an awful barrier board let's let's make it beautiful. So wanting to support and promote that role which can be so vital for all of us. We're going to be launching this network at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Royalton. We invite any of you to come and have a full day of presentations there'll be some trainings discussion and a chance to spend some time together and one thing I think we're hearing during today's talks is the value with the importance of gatherings to placekeeping and to building these networks and to building that kind of community community together. Briefly just want to tell you about some related initiatives that are going on. One of them involves people with the State Historic Preservation Office including Elizabeth of mapping cultural assets and what you see represented there are all the different historical societies in the state. So we can use ArcGIS and the intent is to make this be a layer in our planning atlas that the state maintains and as a test case we're doing historical societies and state historic sites and there would be public metadata available some basic contact information and address but we're talking about what we might also maintain kind of on the back end about their the level of readiness of these various sites. Do they have sprinkler systems? Do they have a disaster plan? Who are their other emergency contact names? And we can use this in powerful ways overlay it with things like the flood the floodplain layer and see where our communities that are most at risk and can we be proactive and go out and engage with them and help them make sure that they are aware of where they are and how they could maybe mitigate the risks that they're facing. Also have been working for a while with with purchasing department here at the state to establish a contingency contract with the disaster recovery vendor this would be for collections and materials if your historic records or other cultural materials did get damaged in the event of a disaster they would be available at the agreed upon price that they set with the state and that would be an opportunity that's available not just for municipalities and state government agencies but for historical societies and other cultural heritage repositories as well. And then the third thing just to be aware of is that D plan which is an online disaster disaster plan template tool is getting an upgrade and will be available hopefully later this year that's been funded also by Dinellen Foundation and is going to be a more flexible tool than it's been in the past and hopefully be scalable to smaller institutions and applicable for performing arts and other arts organizations as well as the cultural heritage community that was initially developed for. And with that I will hand this over to Lauren. Thank you. I'm actually going to pull this off and do the awkward stand up comedians shuffle across the stage. All right so my name is Lauren Oates I see a couple familiar faces in here but not that many. I'm the state hazard mitigation officer at Vermont Emergency Management and so while Emily just talked to you all about emergency planning and your ability to respond to and be prepared for a disaster I'm kind of here to talk to you all about how to try to avoid disaster altogether so that while you should still be prepared for and inclined for hopefully we don't have to worry about that in the future. So while Jamie at the beginning kind of alluded to climate change my work revolves around that quite a bit. So the number one and two natural hazards in the state of Vermont are fluvial erosion and flooded endation respectively. So water water is our problem in Vermont. There are a couple others but they're they're much less significant. We see much less issues with them than we do with water. So we have historic development patterns in the state of Vermont. A lot of our downtown downtown areas are along flood plains and we already referenced this very building maybe not on the second floor we are now but the footprint of this building is within the flood plain as are several dozen other structures in the city of Montpelier and that's just this city that doesn't talk about all the other villages and downtown centers that we have across the state. So it's definitely on my mind regularly that we have not only structures that are important critical facilities but also cultural and historic facilities that are important to our everyday business economy to our our references to our past and what we plan to do in the future so we need to be prepared for and resilient to especially water. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and luckily I don't have to get into too many specifics because that's actually going to talk to you about what this looks like boots on the ground. Actually before I get into this I'm going to go back so I don't want you to see that. This will be kind of helpful for me and this but it will also be helpful on the Q&A later. Can I get a show of hands for people from state agencies in the room? State agencies? How about any federal agencies? No beds. How about a local organization historic society member? Non-profit organizations? Regional planners? And academics? Great. Okay that's helpful. It's a pretty good spread actually. So how many of you if you didn't just see the slide that I accidentally fought forward to know what the term hazard mitigation means by show of hands? All right that's about a third to a half. It's a clunky term. It's FEMA's term. I don't really like it but I use it all the time as in my title. Hazard mitigation is essentially resilience. It's our ability to avoid or remove altogether our vulnerability to natural hazards. So this is a quick graphic or an image rather of a home that was destroyed during jobless term Irene in Pittsfield, Vermont. This is considered a buyout. We do a lot of these in Vermont. We did a lot after Irene but this is just a quick example of how you can remove a vulnerability to natural hazard entirely and therefore not have a disaster when it comes. So this house was destroyed. We came in and bought it with FEMA funding and also community development block grant funding through ACCD and we're able to get these homeowners back to 100% of their pre-disaster value even though this house would clearly not go for much on the market and then the requirement of that grant program mandates that home or that parcel rather be left as open space and perpetuity. It's now functioning flood plain. When the water rises nothing's going to happen there. If there's nothing in the way a flood isn't really a disaster is it? So we do a lot of these. We do a lot of other things. I'm going to talk about them a bit more but that's the easiest way to describe it. Hazard mitigation, climate resilience, they're kind of one and the same. I think when Jamie asked me to present here I was trying to think of well what's the audience going to look like and I just asked you thank you but I also wanted to understand what might be best. I hit the switch. And I was trying to think well if we have a room of academics and non-profit organizations and the cultural and cultural historic preservation friends and organizations agencies here what are they going to want to talk about? Are they going to want to hear me talk about buyouts? Are they going to want to hear me talk about structural elevations of historic properties? Or are they going to want to hear about how they can make sure that their community is considering these types of projects and these types of important facilities in their planning? This is an emergency planning. This is local hazard mitigation planning and each community in the state of Vermont should have one. They don't all have them but most of them do and we regularly see as we review them at the EM that oftentimes cultural and historic facilities the historic societies aren't included in those planning efforts. So if there is a library for instance in a downtown imagine that it's probably in a floodplain and if it's in a floodplain and they have all these incredible resources but they don't know that this type of planning exists and there's funds potentially out there to protect them from future floods then they're missing that opportunity altogether. So if you take one thing from my speech here away I would just say look to your community or to your state agency or to your academics and make sure that you're capturing all of those vulnerabilities that you see in your field that you see structurally but also resources like archives they're they aren't structures but they are important for our our cultural resilience. So a quick overview of what local mitigation planning looks like you have a description of your actual planning process wherein hopefully each of you are at your community tables making sure that you're identifying your vulnerabilities and your capabilities to respond to disasters. An inventory of the community's natural hazards flood flood flood maybe a wildfire and then maybe a landslide inventory of your capabilities so your community's capabilities and all of the entities therein and your ability to address those hazards and reduce your vulnerability and then there's actually a list of specific mitigation actions that should be identified. Upsize that culvert remove that flood vulnerable home elevate that cultural facility by a generator for critical facility. Those are all things that you can include very very specific and this is where you can make sure that your community is considering the cultural and arts and historic reservations side of the fence. And then just one more example off the top of my head I've not forgotten which town this is I think is the town of Lincoln. Thank you everybody. So this is just a quick example of something called flood proofing this is actually called dry flood proofing it's somewhere in between the hazard mitigation and emergency planning this is not a permanent retrofit structure these are small aluminum shields that each way I think they're like six or eight pounds so the average person can pick each of them up you have to understand that a flood event is coming so that's kind of that's kind of why it's not complete vulnerability reduction but it's somewhere in between if you know you're going to have a high water event or a high precipitation event these community members can go out insert the little slats pretty easily and quickly and then in the next picture over you can see that the water actually came up about four feet in this event and this was several years ago now they've had a few actually since then and inside it's completely dry they have to every now and then bring a little mop for a little bit of water that's leaked through but that's it and that's something that you can do with FEMA mitigation funding so in addition to the planning and the different things you can do a reminder that buyouts are an opportunity remove structure vulnerability entirely floodplain gets to be happy and open structural and or utility elevation so something that I always say that surprises people is that in addition to physically lifting a home out of the floodplain footprint still in but the building itself is up above the first floor above the floodplain you can actually you to elevate your utilities to so a lot of our structures in Vermont have first floors that are already above the floodplain but lots of basements and in those basements we have a lot of our utilities you can get FEMA funding to elevate those utilities to the first floor and that's really important especially for cultural and historic facilities that are old and have basements and have kept that out so they can preserve the room on the first and second third floors for community access so that's going to talk about floodplain and wetland restoration so I won't but you can do that with my funding and their other opportunity is also they're on the VEM Vermont Emergency Management website helping answer more questions after all this is over up here so I'm Seth Jensen from the one county planning commission I'm going to give you some examples of some mitigation projects including the planning for mitigation that directly relate to cultural and historic resources many of them are going to be in the village of Jeffersonville there's one example from the neighboring community in the village of Johnson so just some quick background that historic development pattern of compact villages surrounded by open working countryside that is mentioned in a lot of our planning documents presents some challenges in the state of Vermont because most of our historic settlements surrounded by open countryside were built next to water when you're next to water you have to deal with flooding that is the case in the village of Jeffersonville that's the case for most of the villages and downtowns in Lemoyle County. Lemoyle County like many rural areas of Vermont has narrow river valleys surrounded by steep mountain sides so you're either in a flood plain or a steep slope both of those topographies have hazards associated with them because of the location of Lemoyle County at the headwaters of three of the major rivers that flow into Lake Champlain as of 2015 and I haven't checked these numbers since then so they may have changed but as of 2015 Lemoyle County in terms of total number of federal disaster declarations was in the top 200 in the country and the top number of total declared disaster since 1950 in the state of Vermont now that's total number of disasters not total value of damages those numbers are a little different that development pattern that we have and the topography has meant that many of our villages are vulnerable at the 10-year to 50-year flood stage as opposed to the 100-year flood stage so that means that the level of vulnerability that we're planning for is a little bit different than sort of the typical FEMA standard of the 100-year flood which just gets to some interesting discussions when you're working through FEMA stuff and we'll talk a little bit about working with FEMA stuff so the village of Jeffersonville is located at the confluence of the Brewster River which comes off the north slopes of Mount Mansfield and the Lemoyle River. Lemoyle River is either the French word for marrow because it's the river in between the other two rivers or the French word for seagull depending on which myth that is probably wrong about how the river was named you believe in so in 2011 the village of Jeffersonville experienced three major floods that inundated the village and actually required some road closures damaged homes and businesses and required evacuation of the senior housing which is this large building right there. The first two events were in April and May the spring flooding was actually worse in the Moyle County than Tropical Storm Irene. Tropical Storm Irene also impacted the village. This is what it looked like in 2011. You see several of those are pictures of the historic streetscape the Church Street and Main Street inundated with water that you can see in the top corner there the senior housing. The senior housing was elevated when it was constructed to be above 100 year flood elevation but the access road was not and for senior housing especially where there's a sensitive population that may need access to medical care it's not a great situation so because that flooding happened in April and May as opposed to the height of tourism season Smuggler's Notch Resort was able to basically provide the people free housing through until the waters receded. Had that happened in leaf season when Irene happened that probably would not have been an option. Then in the middle is a picture of the old sawdust silos from the former Belgates lumber mill. Keep that silo in mind because it becomes important at the end of the presentation. About eight months after the village experienced this very major flood event Vermont Life which used to be Vermont's tourism print publication published an article about Jeffersonville that basically advertised to the world how hideously ugly the village was when approaching it from Route 15. Now the hook was that but if you get past the fact that all you see is a derelict lumber mill and go into the village there are some great libraries and cultural events and museums but the people in Jeffersonville kind of didn't repass the line that said their community sucked because most people wouldn't. So that after sort of this traumatic natural event was not a great move in the community. So the community had now some pretty big discussions about what to do and some pretty strong feelings about what to do and they actually approached the Regional Planning Commission and asked it for help figuring out what to do because this is a real challenge. You can't really just lift up an entire village and move it but you have these major vulnerabilities so what do you do? One of the things very happy accident that happened was the first we organized a meeting group helped the Villager C funding a planning grant through the hazard mitigation grant program. The first meeting that we held for that process was held in one of the buildings owned by the Historical Society and the guy from the Historical Society who came to unlock the door actually had access because he worked for the Historical Society to lots of old images and maps of the village. Something that was really interesting is this pre-1950s picture of the village didn't come out great but if you see along here the dotted area is the mapped 100-year floodplain. Something that immediately jumps out is that look at that in the pre-1950s most of the village was on the high ground outside of the floodplain so what happened this is what happened when Route 15 was built it was built to take traffic out of the village center by building on the flat ground next to the Lemoile River. I actually read the Lemoile county regional plan from that era and talked about how what a great idea that was so there's possibly some blame to my organization in addition to the agency of transportation here. So what happens when you build a state highway through open green space is that development happens along it so all of this new fill basically creates a barrier that keeps the Rooster River from making it to the Lemoile River and holds it back like a dam and it just so happens that in the path of that dam is the village of Jeffersonville. So one of the things that this helped us understand was why the mapped 100-year floodplain bore almost no relationship to where the village of Jeffersonville actually experienced flooding. It just didn't take into account that major piece of infrastructure. So in that planning process one of the things that we did was really just take all of the ideas that people had for addressing flooding and work with an engineering firm to develop a hydraulic model to test what would happen and that's the list of all of the ideas that came up and we tested I think several dozen. What we learned was what I just told you about it was a human built infrastructure was exacerbating the natural conditions. VTrans was not going to agree to just digging up all over 15 so we asked them to let us dig up part of it and we actually really did do that and so there were two really high priority high impact mitigation projects. One involved replacing the Cambridge Greenway bridge which was an old railroad bridge that was severely undersized by the river and we'll see some pictures of that as well as putting some strategically placed culverts into Route 15. The bottling also showed that putting some culverts into the Route 108 bridge that was under construction at the time would have also alleviate flooding when we told the agency of transportation that we wanted to put holes in the abutment that they had just built they said no. We're also floodplain restoration opportunities along the river and then targeted elevation flood proofing and buyouts so one of the things that came out of this process is that the village actually purchased the green space that remained from the historic Belgase lumber mill which was really the last major undeveloped property in the floodplain that was really a very critical decision by the village. So the way the hazard mitigation grant program works is that after a declared disaster certain amount of money becomes percentage of the total damages becomes available for mitigation to prevent future damages so there was a lot of damage in the state of Vermont after a tropical storm and rain. The price tag of these first two projects was more than a million dollars and the village of Jeffersonville like many of your communities did not have more than a million dollars just sitting in a bank. So it became very clear that if the village was going to do that in this generation they needed to pull together and do it while those funds were available. So one of the lessons to think about here is planning ahead means you are ready to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities that arise. If you don't plan ahead you probably won't be able to do things like this unless you're crazy because the village actually hadn't planned ahead and had some crazy people involved who felt moving forward. So I'm going to talk more about that Cambridge Greenery Bridge replacement project. So this is a project that's complete. It's very nice and pretty. This is what it looked like before. This was a picture taken by the chair of the Select Board in April 2014 right after we finished the modeling and told them that we need you to come up with a million dollars to replace a bridge that isn't actually failing and the chair of the Select Board kind of looked at us like that was a crazy idea and we just suggested to him that the next time that there was a flood he'd just go and look for himself for himself. He did. He took this picture the next day on my voicemail. There was a message from him that said get that bridge out of there put a new bridge in and do it without costing any money to my local property taxpayers. And we did and the only reason we did was because of those funds that became available through the hazard mitigation grant program and the CDBG disaster relief program. So just to give you a sense of well let's go back. So that's actually a bridge that was installed shortly after the 1927 flood. The bridge itself is a historic resource so there's just a little bit of a challenge to think about here is what do you do when one historic resource is increasing the vulnerability to another historic resource? There's not a really good clear easy answer to that but as we're dealing with these increasing we frequent events that cause an increasing amount of damage it's a discussion that we're going to have to have which resources do we preserve by documenting them and which ones do we preserve by actually preserving them as in place. And in this case which ones do we preserve by documenting and finding a reuse location. So this bridge was not scrapped based on the guidance from the state SHPO office. It was removed and relocated to another area of the town of Cambridge. I figured I should probably get that out there given the topic of this discussion. So this is what the river looked like shortly after the bridge was pulled. That old abutment see how it squeezes into the river. So what was happening is the abutments and this is the way we built bridges before we had heavy equipment was you built you squeezed in the river because the longer you're spanned the more expensive the bridge. So the abutments moved into the river and the bridge was also had a had a very large steel plate that dropped three feet down from the deck of the bridge. So it was basically in three different dimensions restricting the flow of the Brewster River and at the two-year stage water would begin backing up into the river channel and around the five to ten-year stage it would actually overflow and get into the village. Keep best circles there for a reason. Keep an eye on that clump of trees and where the old abutment is. The middle abutment as you can see is about five feet further back than the old abutment. And here's the completed bridge. And you can see through there where that clump of trees is. So we didn't just pull back to the bane full width of the river channel. When the railroad was built they filled in a large amount of the floodplain in that area. We actually removed lots and lots of fill to get match the what the elevation in that area would have been to give the river even more room to flood. This is a picture from the December 23 flooding that happened this year. So we talked about what happens when there's a flood during a major important event. Somewhat poetically in Lemoio County and I think in other communities on both the Christmas weekend and Easter weekend there were flood events that based on the modeling would have inundated the village if not for this project. So in one year two really important holiday weekends people were able to stay home and celebrate as opposed to evacuate because of this project. So we often you know in FEMA we talk about cost benefit. There's a whole ratio. It's very mathematical. It's very subjective but I think it's a very strong subjective reason why a project like this would happen. Resiliency you know we talk a lot about the kind of physical form but resiliency is also about the strength of the community. This is from last year around this time last year the last part of this project was planting that that floodplain and what I love about this picture is you have people from three different generations in this space helping to restore the floodplain. One of the people in this picture when we presented the project actually yelled at me about all the money you're going to spend and if you just would let us dredge the river we wouldn't have to do this. And one of the things that we learned from the modeling was that by opening this channel up it would actually help the river better transport the sediment out. And I told him that. I told him that was what was going to happen and it would actually help the river remove the sediment that he was viewing as a problem. He didn't believe me and he told me he would check and he actually came up to me after and said I've been watching I've been checking every time it rains and you're right. So that's another one of those subjective examples and I wasn't right. I didn't I didn't know any of that stuff. We had engineers working with us and I just tell them what they tell me is going to happen because apparently they know what they're doing which is good. Engineers should know what they're doing. So that's part of I think part of what's important about this is people becoming invested in their communities and seeing a hope for the future of their communities. That is something that this community had lost after those three flood events and that unfortunate article. And I think seeing them reclaim it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. One of the we're going to talk a little bit about home elevations even with all of that there were still going to be vulnerable structures that just the reality of a village next to a river. One of those structures is this home the red one which is a historic home. I think it's the second oldest home in the village. Elevating historic structures means changing their relationship to the surrounding ground has issues that you have to address to be historically sensitive. So one of the things that we worked with with this property owner was to visualize what that would look like. This is a computer generated simulation. This is their simulation to understand what it was going to mean for them unloading firewood. So this is pre-elevation location of the porch where they pull up their pickup truck and unload firewood. This is post-elevation where it was going to be. That just gives you a sense of how much needed to happen to move this home out of the flood plain. This is Saruba the loyal steed watching the horde. The house be elevated and very confused about what was happening. So rural Vermont dealing with elevations means dealing with all of the normal FEMA stuff you have to deal with and firewood and livestock. It's complicated. This is the home complete with the elevation now and they really did a good job of matching and trying to restore the historic context or maintain the historic context. If we get to time and questions we can talk about how that works with FEMA or it doesn't work with FEMA as the case might be. But these are things when you're thinking about a historic resource in your village or downtown. There are things you can do to protect them and still maintain the historic care. That's the lesson of that. This is one more structure. This is the Johnson Public Library. Not in Jeffersonville it's in Johnson. That's the name Johnson Public Library. Nice old building of that era. This is what happens in Johnson when the Gion floods. And you can see that the waters come right up to the basement of the building. Like most old buildings in Vermont the basement is used for storage. It's used for heating system. It's used for storage and electric equipment. We actually worked with the community to figure out what to do about this and all of the options for FEMA level mitigation were out of range of what the community could afford. That includes the match. And unfortunately in this case well it's not really unfortunate that there were not millions of dollars of HMGP money and CDVG disaster relief money because that means there hadn't been another hurricane that devastated the state. But the result of that was that the resources were not available for this community. So what they are doing instead is sort of a temporary fix. Moving what they can, the furnace system, the utilities, the storage out of the basement into less vulnerable areas and being really smart and careful about monitoring what happens and the levels of the river. So that is given if there are not millions of dollars on the table the lesson of this is there are some things you can do and planning ahead is still worth it. Last slide for me. These are those silos that Vermont life said were an awful blight on the landscape. Completely independent of any of the Regional Planning Commission. The local arts council applied for an animating infrastructure grant to put murals on those silos. And people now stop to take pictures of that. And one of the great things is that when the village of Jeffersonville rode their 2012 plan it was that picture we showed at the beginning of the village under water. When they just revised their plan for 2019 this is the picture on the cover. And so just you know many times in rural Vermont the story isn't always good right now. We talk a lot about the challenges rural Vermont is facing but I just want to leave with the thought that resiliency is about the people and investing in the people and empowering the people of those communities. When entities like the Regional Planning Commission, State agencies like the EM, the shippers office, VTrans and others work as partners and have a role that goes beyond permanent grant compliance. Vermont communities can do amazing things and that is really key to overcoming the challenges many of our communities are facing. Thank you. My name is Ben Havoc. I'm the team leader of property care for Historic New England. Historic New England is a regional heritage organization. We do many things but my job there is the preservation and maintenance of our 37 historic sites. That's about 160 buildings and 1,300 acres of land in its various facets. So at Historic New England we've defined resiliency as having the capacity to prevent, withstand, respond to and recover from disruptions to our museum site structures and collections. And of course that's a wide range of activities whether it's a car hitting your 1770s house or any number of issues flooded basements or trees down. But all of our kind of actions over the years we realized the natural events were the ones that really demanded a lot of our time. So we did start to focus on the climate, the weather and then inevitably climate change. And again there's a lot of different facets to climate change. We've talked about flooding. I'm worried about rain all the time. And so for New England you know the statistics are general precipitation is up five inches over the last 100 years. But more importantly is when that rain falls and it's not spread out it's when you have an intense rainstorm it's it's raining even more intense. And so that has implications for all buildings but obviously historic structures specifically. And for a reason it'll become obvious in a in a second I happen to know that in Maine rainfall intensity numbers. So the amount of rain you might have in a 10-year storm it has increased 25% since 1978. So this isn't like 2% statistical operation. This is this is a lot of more rain that we're seeing. Whereas at rain we we've talked about storm inundation, tidal flooding, localized flooding. Most of this rain is now accompanied with 50 mile an hour winds or more. That's causing an effect whether it's blowing the rain in or blowing your trees down. So we're thinking about that all the time and it's overwhelming all of our drainage systems gutters the site drainage all aspects of are we trying to move water away from our buildings. And that creates accelerated building and landscape damage increased habitat for pests increased risk to the collections in the houses and then of course increased risk to the visitors who are visiting your site. What we realized is we're doing all of these different things to preserve the houses but if we just change how we think about it it becomes a resiliency plan because we still need to take care of the trees whether wind's blowing them down or not and we still need to replace our roofs do gutter work, cladding, site drainage all of these things happen but now we're saying what's different like how should we should we approach these these aspects a little bit differently now that we know maybe perhaps the traditional way we've approached them doesn't quite work. Just as some examples we have what I want to think is a fairly good kind of emergency preparedness system we talk about it a lot we talk about how we're going to react to different issues we engage all aspects of our organization in it we try to talk about how we handle collections in an event how we do different aspects so we are talking about emergencies on a regular basis. Tree care has for the last 10 years been an important part of our management of our historic properties. I would say actually the amount of damage we actually sustained from trees is very minimal and I credit the amount of money we invest in caring for the trees. We have spent a lot of time trying to get the water away from our buildings and this was before we even mentioned the word climate change within my organization and it's complex at a historic site because we've got archaeological resources below grade you don't want to change the historic landscape very much so how do you get all of this happening and then that's a big site-wide project in the meantime we still need to just get water away from you know the foundation whatever way we can so we we engage both small scale and big scale and then very quickly we have been noting I've taken a variety of pests within our museums and that a lot of that seems to be with changing conditions we're experiencing whether the basement is a little bit wetter that's a different habitat though the temperatures we're seeing even March the bugs aren't really dying the way they used to die over the winter so we're seeing that so the infestation doesn't really die out it just keeps the repopulating greater and greater so I said we do this already we prepare gutters we fix gutters but we decided to put a new lens on it and that was the what is really happening with our gutters are they good enough for today's rainstorms and then carrying that forward if rain if climate change really does make rain more and more intense storms over the next 20 30 years are we actually prepared for that and what are our failure points and this is a very abbreviated presentation so I'm just cutting to the summary which is gutter capacity or its ability to carry water it's basically based on they design around a 10-year storm we found that half of the gutters in our study and it was it was called the main gutter study because we looked at nine sites in the state of Maine and we looked at 21 gutter systems half of them basically failed just a standard you know design guideline for today three quarters failed that worst case scenario which is the hundred-year storm so so across the board we were looking at high failure rates for our gutters to be able to carry water away from our building this was shocking to me I did not want to hear that and and the more I think alarming statistic was anywhere we had a wood gutter a nice good wood gutter because we're an historic organization that was almost a hundred percent failure rate even at the 10-year storm now downspouts so gutters I was specifically talking about that horizontal thing at the roof line the downspout actually once the water gets the downspout it was tended to be fine whether we had you know big corrugated aluminum downspouts or you know metal ground downspouts whatever it was it tended to carry the water that got there but maybe it wasn't really getting there because the gutter was too small or more significantly the outlet the little device that connects the gutter to the downspout and what we found over and over again so no matter how big your gutter is you might have just had this tiny pipe to connect it to your downspout so again the size of the downspout doesn't matter because only so much water is getting there and in fact statistically it was about 50 percent failure rate when we when we ran the calculations and found that well almost globally if you had an outlet that was less than two inches you were failing failing the calculations and if you had over two inches you were generally passing so so this was all very interesting to me um made me think that uh well first of all our historic gutter systems are gonna fail and and they're failing now so regardless of what happens with future climate change uh we're already in a failure point the water is not going where we wanted to go uh historic structures are already prone to water damage so now we're intensifying that with our gutter systems uh being a good 110-year-old historic preservation organization we replace in time that means we take what we have and we replace it exactly the way it is that can't keep going and that's a shocking thing for my organization to uh come to grips with because that is the cornerstone of what we do uh but we can't just keep putting a wooden gutter up if it's going to fail and not carry the water away from the building what point is that going to serve uh and uh new design standards need to be considered uh the 10-year storm for us isn't a good design guideline it's it's too small and if we're predicting the lifespan of a gutter we need to predict out what the rain's going to be in the future so we're playing around with a lot of different concepts uh right now how we take these findings and put it into um application now the final thing I'll talk about since I'm in Vermont uh is that we actually have a two-year partnership with Middlebury College uh and it's built around resiliency how great that I'm here talking about uh so the first year of the project we've had one intern uh and uh she worked with us she helped us come up with that definition of resiliency she looked at a lot of things helped us actually say hey we have this framework already do these things already let's let's repackage it uh we just started year two monday uh we have three interns this year uh looking at a wide range of activities not just rain but rains sea level uh rise how that's affecting we looked at we're looking at a cluster of four properties we have and we're trying to look at how all of these different things may affect our historic sites or uh rising water table how that's going to affect are we we built a drainage system in one of our sites uh is that going to be no longer good because the water table is saturating that those drainage elements we're trying to kind of do this analysis so that we're better positioned uh and we've always been really good about single site work that's kind of what the cornerstone of my organization uh but we know it's a bigger problem and how do we just like what they were saying how do we better integrate with local and regional planning uh as part of that and of course we have actually meetings set up with our regional planners who are doing a lot of work in the town that uh we're looking at so that we can start to kind of broaden our conversation about how we integrate uh not just at the site level but also uh kind of at the community level um and with that thanks everyone uh a couple of things just to tie a few things together uh what we're doing uh these days at the division as was mentioned a little bit we're focusing on doing survey in these frontline areas so that we can have the recordation and the documentation of these historic resources prior to these incidents happening um helping to identify some of the best practices i know when we talk about hazard mitigation stuff i would prefer the elevations often the buyouts are easier though and and and so the none of this comes easy but the more information that we have available even some of the projects that seem easy it can be hard to get there sometimes and also just as a conduit to continue to bring technical assistance to folks and support the networks that are developing because it really is needs for a collaborative effort here so with that i just wanted to open it up uh if there are any questions or comments anyone had any specific questions yeah my question is about the space where we lost nation uh i'm wondering if that has anything to do with the apodaki idiots anybody know anything about it i have to ask the folks here it's happening across the the public camera oh hi who had the question i i'm asking about this space lost nation is that anything to do with the apodaki idiots um not directly no um lost our founder and our founding artistic director kim bent is a native vermonter uh six or seventh generations he grew up in the brain tree area looking across at a mountain range that was is known to people uh in the area as lost nation it's not on the map and as he traveled around he realized that there were many lost nations across the country and that the were they were inevitably rural areas nebulous boundaries oftentimes not on the map so for him when he came back to vermont it was a way for him to commit to being in vermont and committing to a specific place in a specific community but sort of also being out there on the frontier doing um new things and creating new spaces um but a usual name yes a lot of people think it's either political or or uh native american um it's a little bit of both i think he's a one eighth he's got one eighth uh one sixteen one sixteen uh native american apodaki uh blood blood yeah well if you come and see a show here at lost nation the explanation is in our play well but yeah other questions yeah so um replacing replacing not in time so is there a protocol or thoughts moving ahead with what do you put in place in historic wooden gutters bigger historic wooden gutters right so it's a challenge uh we're also recognizing that it might not be all or nothing uh that we have massive built-in wooden gutter that we had no desire to do anything with but the outlet was an inch and a half all the damage we were seeing was at that end where the outlet is so we made the outlet bigger and we're going to watch and we're going to see what happens and see if that does it i will say that we had two wooden gutters that we had replaced uh previously with copper in the outline of the original uh profile of the wooden gutter uh both of those uh passed both calculation tests hundred year storm uh included so i think alternative materials to wood uh is going to be another um a conversation point i just had a follow-up question so with the gutter replacements would this have to go through the commonwealth of mass issues it's as part of the mitigation process or uh well around state preservation office so i work for a private nonprofit uh so uh the answer is complicated uh we're in uh 22 different communities and five states not in vermont i know uh but the um uh if they're if we're in a local historic district we would need to get approval and we did get the approval for the the enlargement of the outlet actually we had to get state approval because it was a change uh i've applied to state agencies for changing a couple other gutters uh and uh so so it depends uh who has jurisdiction on on the property uh some properties no one has jurisdiction except ourselves uh so that gives us a different uh latitude kind of a question for both then and just kind of mitigation so i think even the best planned out kind of downspouts or gutters don't work if the gutters full of leaves just like every other gutter and then we get so what steps is this is going on taking to kind of making sure that they're staying on top of that and all the other maintenance things that are acquired for making sure that water stays away and then also is there funding out there because that's the type of mitigations is taking care of the things that are in place already uh well i really like that angle because no preservation grant will will give you money for patients or painting for some reason uh you know so i'd love to know if you know would give me money but uh yeah i mean i think we're trying to uh step up everywhere uh proactive maintenance activities uh with gutters and top uh you know you're either off there every week or you're going to have a clogged gutter i think the realization for us is that some of the damage that we were seeing was not a result of clogged gutters it was actually something entirely different so it's not to say we shouldn't clean our gutters that is still a major issue for us but i was kind of up oh that's this house that's forwarded you know the gutters 40 feet up in the air and there is no trees nearby and we've never seen a leaf in there we're still getting the same damage you would think you would get from a clogged gutter and so that that's when you know we started really thinking about it in a different way uh sure answers no i think people would not they don't typically for mitigation projects do anything that would require ongoing maintenance it really is to try to permanently remove or reduce the vulnerability so their approach in the gutter instance would be like make it a lot bigger put a cover over it and then get rid of the trees so there are no leaves going forward like that that's not an actual project that you could do in that project in that example that's what you do with mitigation question here and then i think um you kind of made a comment about the replacing in kind being a hard decision point for your organization and as you can imagine that's a hard decision point for a lot of communities that have to start preservation ordinances or plans and i wonder if in any of the states or communities that you have properties if you're aware that any of them have gone through a process of understanding or creating guidelines around replacement materials if you know of any examples off the top of your head uh well that that is a big media uh subject one i will now play my organization again we're we're diving into as well uh i'm going to hear about a grant to do a testing program on altered materials so that we can test certain aspects of how they look buildings uh i would say it's purely a community by community example i could point to the city of Cambridge uh massachusetts uh the executive director there the historical commission is is pro alternative materials where it makes sense uh and so he is very open to that we have found places throughout New England that are open to that but many that are absolutely no way will never approve it and so we're looking we're trying to look at the problem look at the gutters and then say well we have an issue here we have some potential solutions and now we want to kind of share it uh to to broaden the conversation and we want to look at alternative materials in a general sense as well or i should say substitute wood materials uh so that we can uh figure out where we even stand on that as a general rule and how how we might be able to apply that uh and work with local communities Tom yeah i think this is a really relevant timely topic and it uh really hinted a lot on communication and i think part of the message that i hope that we can all work towards is communicating with the engineering community the architects and so on time to change it and the the old standards may not apply even some of the the discussions that uh uh you gave us your wonderful presentation on on the issues in Jeffersonville and what about act 250 and uh you know do we need to revisit some of these engineering standards to better evaluate potential impacts natural as well as human made uh a risk so i i i hope the human associated risk is also something that is not overlooked we've heard a lot about the natural and to be sure climate change or anything but i mean living in burlington vermont i i worry about a lake mechanic issue with fuel uh a change on the waterfront if something were to happen there what would happen to the city of 40 thousand people what could we drink i mean these kinds of severe risks really need to be part of the equation and of course it is also linked with storm events and everything else so if we are seems like we're headed into a more challenging time but to keep up with it yeah oh i just wanted to say um you asked about the question of act 250 um um and then a few things about the other thing but um for both of the mitigation projects um we worked very hard to convince the district coordinator that there was no act 250 jurisdiction uh for those projects um and i think that with the arguments were uh legitimate um for the in i'm going to get myself in trouble but i'm i'm not in the office so i think it's okay whether it's based on historic resources or natural resources many of our permitting guidelines are based on no adverse impact um and kind of uh you know if you keep it pretty much how it is things are going to be okay is the underlying philosophy um the lesson of all the work we've done jefferson bill and with the flood modeling is that that's no longer a workable standard um that's a huge issue for um state level permitting as well as federal level permitting um and um it does mean that we have not a lot of time if the climate change you know projections pan out not a lot of time to figure out what are new standards need to be so the last sort of piece of that is um when the new bridge and roundabout will be built in 2010 the community actually raised questions to be trans about the flood impacts that two years later we modeled better um and this is not to beat upon retrans they are working within the parameters that they are within uh with federal guidelines that the the community was saying you need to size these bigger because our observations are saying there's more water than your calculations are saying and their response was we're meeting the regulations we're meeting the standards and those standards again not to be the patrons those standards are what federal highway will pay for what they're authorized to do um gosh like we've been a lot different for loren and i over the last five years if the trains had put in a culvert in the roundabout that was five times the size um a lot of the stuff we've done that is needed to be happening we would only get to dig up through 15 twice but there's no way federal highway would have let me translate that so we have to do something well i just wanted that's all we have time for today i want to keep folks from the next session i wanted to thank our all of our presenters for their time and efforts here and thank all of you for your attention it's been a great rest of your day