 All right, so as I was saying, the path of every storm looks different, rainfall amounts look different, what debris and so where can be different and so it's often difficult to make exact apples to apples comparisons between events. But all indications are that the programs and projects undertaken to repair damage following tropical storm Irene and improve resiliency performed after a blue summer. In the coming years it will be imperative to continue to build on this work and implement programs and projects both built back better and a proactive investments that enhance resilience. To my mind, this work can really be organized into four broad categories. The first is investing in nature-based solutions. The next is floodproofing and hardening existing infrastructure that needs to remain in vulnerable locations. The third is designing and maintaining reliable infrastructure not only for current but also future climate conditions, and then finally being ready with fast, effective responses recovery. And I'll talk about each one of those in a little bit more detail. Starting with nature-based solutions. The focus here is really on the conservation and restoration of different areas of the landscape. Action by protecting and restoring wetlands and flood plains, giving rivers more rooms to spill over their banks without causing catastrophic flooding, as well as conserving strategic large woodland tracks to ensure forests remain forests to both soak away stormwater and protect biodiversity. Importantly, many of these nature-based solutions can really pull double duty in our clean water work. And as a result, we have made significant investments in these types of projects over the last eight years under the umbrella of clean water. This includes replanting an estimated 328 acres of forested riparian buffers, restoring 109 acres of flood plain, purchasing easements on nearly 1,500 acres of riparian corridors, conserving and restoring more than 1,200 acres of wetlands, and supporting the conservation of some 26,000 acres of land with explicit natural resources protections. An example of this type of work in the developed landscape is the Water Street River Park in North Yacht, which is sort of a poster child. Flooding along the Dodd River during the tropical storm, I rain damaged 18 homes in this Water Street neighborhood. And the town worked with the affected property owners in FEMA to secure voluntary flood buyouts that both helped move those homeowners out of harm's way and allowed the town to acquire and restore five acres of flood plain right outside North Fields downtown. That five-acre area is now known as the Water Street River Park, and it has walking paths and community members use it as well as their dogs, both to access the river for wading and fishing, as well as general recreation. During wet weather events, however, it holds that double duty as a flood plain. And there are great photos. If you haven't seen them, I'm happy to share them around of flood waters being stored in that park during wet weather events, including that which we experienced earlier this year. As a result, the park has reduced flood risk and has enhanced the downtown in that neighborhood. In terms of flood proofing or hardening infrastructure, these are changes that are made to eliminate flood damage to buildings, including things like our drinking water and wastewater facilities, which by virtue of their operations need to be located close to a river and, therefore, are practical to the best possible location. It's also building sometimes. Our historic settlement patterns, obviously, didn't work, but in place with climate change in mind. And so an example is the investments made in the Waterbury State Office complex following Tropical Storm Irene. In the complex, all the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems have been moved from the basement to higher floors. And the basement was then actually built and structurally reinforced concrete. So the lowest floor elevation in those historic buildings is now above the 500-year level. As a result, though, the complex piece of flooding during the last 20 years and was fully open and operational within two weeks, as opposed to the months and years following Tropical Storm Irene. The next piece is thinking about infrastructure design decisions, not only with current but also future climate change in mind and keeping up with the needs of improvements. This is things like ensuring the reliability of the hundreds of dams throughout Vermont, as well as replacing undersized bridges and culprits with wider, sometimes important, as thankful structures that internally damage during flood events. One need not look at further than Vermont Route 107 in the Bethel, Killington, and Stockbridge area. Following Irene, these roadways needed to be fully reconstructed and as part of that work, damaged bridges were replaced by new structures with increased waterway openings. In addition, hundreds of tons of large diameter rock was used to reinforce particularly vulnerable sections of the roadway. And although Route 101 and 107 required temporary closures during the July and early August rains due to flooding, the roadways reopened quickly and required relatively modest repairs. And I'm sure Secretary Flynn from the Agency of Transportation can speak about other examples or that one in more detail. And finally, in terms of fast and active response, it's essential to supporting the safety and well-being of Vermonters in the face of climate change. Some of the best examples, at least in the world I live in, are seen relatively mundane but are important. Things like the established relationships we now have between our river engineers, the town road foremen, and counterparts of the Agency of Transportation. And the fact that we've developed emergency permitting guidelines and can waive public comment periods during a declared state of emergency, allowing us to move quickly to effective repairs. Ultimately, we know we need to continue to work for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and invest in programs and projects that will make Vermont more resilient. The team at ANR, including our Climate Action Office, who's represented here today, helps improve resilience through science-based monitoring and analysis, information sharing, public outreach, and technical assistance, providing grants and cross-shared support, the implementation of sustainable and effective projects. We know we can't simply snap our fingers and become resilient. It will require a long-term commitment and a workable plan. This afternoon, you're gonna hear from key program leaders here at ANR, as well as our partners at BDM. We'll share more specific information from their vantage points about how we've identified and are working to systematically address impacts from the summer's floods, including issues related to rivers, dam safety, and landslides. And then you're gonna hear about ongoing work to further enhance landscape-level resilience, the importance of which was further emphasized by the summer's floods, putting the hazard mitigation work being led by Vermont Emergency Management and tools being developed by the Climate Action Office that should be ready soon to help Vermont municipalities that are proactively identify and address their vulnerabilities. And although there are days where it can certainly seem like a small silver lining, as communities continue the hard work of recovery, the impact of the coordination, education, and planning, and implementation that Vermonters engaged in by green was validated during the summer's flooding, reinforcing the value of our approach to improving and enhancing resilience across the Vermont lands. And just before maybe having to answer any questions, did want to introduce we have new leadership within the Department of Environmental Conservation where a lot of the programs you're going to hear from in a moment are housed and joined today by Commissioner Jason Batchelder, who may be a familiar face to some, having retired as the Colonel of the Wurton Force about two years ago. And then Deputy Commissioner Heather Pember, who is a longtime AMR-DEC employee with background in water quality. And happy to either have them step up and introduce themselves first, answer questions or if you'd like to hand over to Chair Shelton. I think in the interest of time, we should go to the next presenter, I think is Commissioner Batchelder. Thanks Secretary Moore. Thank you Madam Chair. Good afternoon everyone. Especially Representative Patton, knocked on my door personally, asked for my vote, which I had already given. I was, thank you very much for your service to Vermont, especially during these multiple times that affect all our corners and boundaries and seems to be closer every day. My name is Jason Batchelder. I'm the new commissioner of Army and Environmental Conservation. You're surrounded by, at least on one side, some of our extraordinary team. I have a huge team, which I'm not accustomed to yet. I was the Director of the Wurton Service, which was a wonderful career. I'm so thankful for being called upon by the Secretary and the Governor to step into this new role. I want to read an excerpt from an email I sent to my staff. I'll be quick, I promise Chair. A couple of my priorities that I'm gonna turn over. But I get asked a lot about what brought me here. I came from a world of criminal law enforcement and now I'm in a much more dynamic and fast-moving world, which I never expected. But what has brought me here and which I love to talk about and hope to be invited here to continue to do so because I feel it's relevant. In short, it's a connection to Vermont and to public service that we all share. We also share our vocation to be driven through and passed, which can be said in another way and extraordinarily relevant to my team here. We all likely wanted to do what we're doing now since we knew that we needed to do something. My connection to the outdoors comes largely from a drive to fish and hunt and to gather my food. I love food from literally anywhere on the planet, but I really love to punctuate my pursuits with really great food. Related to this job, I'm not going to eat it or feed it to my children if it's not safe and sustainable at all levels. Most Vermonters share similar values in one state or another, and in certain they can continue to live in, on, with the land, clean air and clean water, which they depend on is a great way to serve them. And that's essentially why I'm here. In and among those, some priorities are emerging for me and feel indulged me. Certainly flood resilience and recovery is high on that list. Hardening of infrastructure, which affects more than just DC. It's certainly relevant to this committee and I appreciate your forward-looking attention to what already TCVs and T-FAS and emerging contaminants are right there as well. And it seems to be, if we're not looking at flood recovery and resilience, we're looking at contaminants. You'll likely hear and see and feel these pressures as much as we do and many of you are liking work, steep in the knowledge of them than I am and likely ever will be. My subject matter expertise is not there yet, but it's growing by the day. And certainly a look at our internal processes is a priority for me. And to not be in the way of the governor's attempt to solve our housing crisis. Everyone's attempt to solve our housing crisis, right? I certainly don't wanna be in any way a new pediment to that through any processes that we might have. I hope we have a bigger ask and I'll ever be able to achieve. But I'm anxious to get started. I'm happy to be here and I probably not have time for any questions, but I'm happy to take any and thank you for having us here today. I don't believe that Commissioner Prenbrook is gonna say anything. She's welcome to introduce herself. But then I believe, are we in order? No, I think Ben. Yeah, I think Ben. Oh, certainly. Ben Young is gonna be next. He's our State Geologist and the Director of the Geology Program. He is joining us remotely today and I hope that's set up. Again, thank you. I'm gonna move over here, but I'm happy to chat. He should be here for the duration. So thank you very much. Oh, Ben Green is next on our agenda. Okay, no problem. No problem. We've got to pretend. Yeah. This might be good. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah, I have some print out some of the presentation. And we have them posted on our webpage too. Okay. After my name is Ben Green. I'm the section chief of the dam safety program of the Department of Environmental Conservation. I thank you very much for the invitation to come and as we do today about dams and dam safety in Halvah, July. All the advantage as well as a small event in December impacted our program in the dam to Vermont. This image here on the cover photo is a real image of watery dam which is the largest state on the dam. It's still owned and operated by our department today. One of the favorite is a brief overview of the history of the dams and dam safety in Vermont. It kind of hit some of the main high points. Interestingly, Vermont was actually the first state in the nation to enact dam safety legislation in 1876. I need to think that we were the first there. This was done in response to the Mill Dam failure in Massachusetts which is still within the SDM failure in human history with 139 lives clean. Other notable things in Vermont history is the 1927 flood which I imagine we've heard quite a bit about. A lot of record in Vermont and during the event many dams failed before the important 84 lives were lost likely due to both dam failure and internal flooding. It also resulted in the design and construction of the three industry overflow dams for which my program is possible for today. Moving along in the timeline in the 1950s and 60s was a time of dam building in the state. The Army Corps of Engineers built flood control dams in the Connecticut Valley. Also, the Soil Conservation Service had a dam building program where many farmers built farm bonds at that time at that dam. Fast-forwarding to 2011 was dropped with Storm Irene, which I surely all remember. The major flood and we're all very fortunate not to have any major dam failures during that event. In 2018, our program was given rulemaking authority for the first time. Storm Irene had very limited authorities to enact the enemy in the state and this allowed us to play catch up with federal standards of other states. And in July, 2023, of course, we had this major flood event that resulted in failure in reaching a five regulated dams and the overtopping of 50 dams and not even included on the timeline was the small flood we had right before Christmas. And this, in fact, as of 1900, our records in our program indicate there's not approximately 75 dam failures in the state of Vermont. Now, for instance, we're doing program overview. We're located in the Water Investment Division. Our mission statement is listed here. Our two primary responsibilities, dam regulation of non-hydro-power, non-pedical dams, as well as state-in-ownership of 14 dams and we have three minutes. Our current staffing is five. We have two licensed engineers, myself in one limited service position. We have two staff and two more in the service position. All right, now we have a project that will help us with the remaining work. Under our legislation, just under our regulatory side, we work under 10 VSA chapter 40 dams. Again, that's limited to non-federal, non-power dams. And we're also at the ownership piece, which is, as I mentioned, 14 dams we're responsible for. Next, I just wanted to briefly review how dams are classified, relative to the potential for losses downstream that they have in the event of the dam failure, dam incidents, and that's true of what's called hazard potential. And the state uses a system of four hazard potentials and this is in line with the natural maturity of dams and other federal programs. They are high, significant, low, minimal, which means the state has a classification of one of those. A high hazard dam is one in the event of an incident or a dam failure, and there's probably a lot of people who will be involved in loss of life. Down to a low hazard dam or a minimal hazard dam, which is in the event of a dam failure, losses would be pretty limited. Couple of things to note about hazard potential classification is that it's dynamic classification. It can change in time, it can change with downstream development, other factors, and also it's independent of condition. So you can have a dam, it's not a very good condition. It doesn't have very much downstream of it, so it's maybe a low hazard dam as opposed to all that which really was downstream of the dam condition of the dam. So my program is also responsible for maintaining a Vermont dam inventory. Part of it is all by our predecessors, and it's been updated since to a web-based format. You can see the number of records here and it's broken up here just by the number of dams per regulatory entity in the state. The DDC from my work regulates roughly 1,000 dams. The utility commission regulates roughly 20 dams. The letter D regulatory commission roughly 80. And then the federal dams are self-regulated, so the dams are owned by the Army Board of Engineers, National Park Service, et cetera. And I have a little bit more into the inventory of dams. The chart on the upper left shows the purposes of dams in the state. Roughly 60% of the dams in the state are for primary purpose of recreation. Conversely, less than 1% of dams have a primary purpose of flood control. So I may be able to provide some measurable benefit of flood control, but there's only a very small number that's their primary purpose, and that's their main function. And the upper right is dam has potential classification if you look at the orange and red. Pies on the upper right of that chart, you can see that roughly 30% of Vermont dams are higher significant hazard. This is a number that's actually increasing. And as time goes by, as we use modern techniques we've got potential classification of these dams and as well as increased downstream development of dams. And the lower left is Vermont dam age. And from this chart, you can see that over 80% of Vermont dams are over 50 years of age. With a typical design life of both dams of 50 years, it's just an indicator of inventory as a whole as aging, which by doing the standards is not uncommon. But it does show us the age of our inventory. And then in the lower right is ownership type. It may seem surprising to many folks, but actually 60% of our dams are privately owned. The dams on the minor and major water parks is can in fact be privately owned at a better level. That number is roughly 65%. So we're sort of in line with what the national average is. Conversely, roughly 15% of dams in the state are state owned with the agency natural resources owning a hundred of those dams. The majority of them, that's of course we have 20 DEC, FPR, and Fish and Wildlife. I've wanted to just briefly go through a couple key initiatives that we have on each side of our work, first for 40 key initiatives, the rulemaking effort that we're working on that's been going on since 2018. Historically, the program has had very limited authorities. For example, our inspection program was voluntary to dam owners and we did not historically have the authority to compel owners to make dam safety improvements. So this rulemaking really is a paradigm subject to a more active and proactive regulatory style for regulating dams in the state. And it's spate, there's been adopted phases, phase one was adopted in 2020, and phase two is hopefully in place in 2025 and it will certainly make it much more proactive in terms of dam safety regulation as we will have the authority to require owners to take proper measures to maintain their dams and food condition. On the ownership side, one of our key initiatives is the Waterbury Dam Stilway Replacement Project. This is a project we've been working on for many years within the District of the Unrequired Engineers. It's been estimated to be a $70 to $100 million project. And it started in the early 2000s when concrete issues of the dam caused gate jamming and sense has been determined that the floodgates of Waterbury only safely capable of handling 75% of their design flood load. So this project, which is right now in the pre-designed phase, we're moving to design and construction hopefully in the 2027, 2028 timeframe. So we'll basically restore full functionality to Waterbury, our largest flood control dam and largest state of the dam. I'd like to shift gears a little bit and just focus on the July 23 flood event. Perhaps you've seen a specific year this was developed by the National Weather Service. It shows the great fall totals from the July event. Largely focused along the spine on the Green Mountains with Palace Vermont having 9.2 inches of the graceful amount of rainfall and generally four to eight being pretty common rainfall amounts measured. Of course resulted in the declaration of state emergency and federal declaration that had quite an impact on the dam's inventory as well as our ownership portfolio. Like the first to start by talking about the Wynuszki River flood control dams, they're our highest risk asset and how they perform. Riceville made national news, it's okay just up the road here, Texas Montpelier. Essentially, we had a priority of that reservoir about flood storage reservoirs fall. And we had a first pool of record me as the highest pool that that reservoir has seen since the dam was constructed in the 1930s. We moved just 10 inches from having water flow over the Exilbury spillway, which by itself is not a dam safety concern issue, but would have resulted in more water going downstream. I have a subsequent slide where I'll talk a little bit more about specifics of what really happened at Riceville, how it performed. And the other one there, two dams that we have, Eastbury was also a pool of record. We had a bit more breathing room there. We were roughly 12 feet from the spillway there. Not to say we weren't sweating a little bit, but we had a little bit more breathing room. And then Waterbury, we were roughly six and a half feet below our action level in the fourth pool of record there. So the three flood control dams performed well, but we saw a lot of their flood capacity used up during this event, and sure. So also during the event, in terms of these facilities were continual storm, stormed dam monitoring, including around the clock monitoring of Waterbury and Riceville. We did a lot of the flood validation mapping and emergency coordination of the towns downstream of Waterbury, Riceville, and Eastbury. Delta did some, a lot of the spectral work associated with the dams, including post event tunnel inspections at Riceville and Eastbury, where we did find some minor damage sustained by the tunnel at Riceville due to a flood event. As well as working with the Army Corps to study how Riceville and Eastbury survived the events and how we could maybe make some eventual changes to those dams and maybe make them perform better. This slide is focused on the performance of Riceville dam during the event. And this dam was by far the one that was filled the most and the highest concern during the event. And this figure here, this cartoonish figure is a trough section of Riceville dams to kind of show you how the dam designed to work. It's called a self-regulating flood control dam. On the left side of this image is the upstream side where we see the water on the downstream side is to the right. And the way to, our water typically passes through the site is the packed structure and the left side of the image. It is located in normal pool or at the principal spillway level. Water typically drops into that vertical shaft and passes through the dam through the tunnel that goes through the foundation of the dam. And then above that you can see the red arrows and a 50 foot flood storage band. We have 50 foot of available flood storage in that reservoir up to the auxiliary spillway. Essentially during this event we used up 49 and a half feet of that. We were very fortunate it would go higher. The issue largely being we still have lots of free board or available capacity above that from a dam safety perspective, but we would have started to discharge water downstream a few feet of which would have resulted in what we call down failure consequences which would just be additional flooding cause downstream that could impact its property and homes and things like that. Figuring the lower right just shows the water level over time during this flood event. You can see it was 20, this reservoir was 20 days at an elevated pool. It's a little bit longer than ideal. You can see the verge of getting kind of some up and downs. We were fortunate not to have a back to back storm event during that period because we were not drawing down very quickly just to the way the dams were figured. We have no ability to operate gates or have it, this is largely self-regulating facility. So we were hands are a bit tied in terms of getting the water down real quickly. And that's one of the things we're looking at with the core is there is a way to make some modifications here to improve on that performance. Having a technology day. Oh, there it goes. Just to do a brief overview of how A&R dams performed during the event of our 14 dams, three sustained some level of minor damage, noise bond dam, took some minor damage on the spillway that was repaired. Waterbury dam, as I mentioned, has the existing issues with the gate that we're working with the core on and also doing a temporary project to help improve that in the short term until we can do the larger project. And also right spill, I understand there were some issues with the tunnels and other things. From our FPR owned dam standpoint, five of the 15 dams took minor damage but were all performed well. And then for fish and wildlife owned dams, 17 of the 76 sustained some level of minor damage but were all performed well, with the exception of being gale meadows dam which activated a auxiliary spillway in this image on the lower right shows the head cutting that occurred as the once the flow was receded, a lot of head cutting occurred there, erosion that moved pretty much further back and could have caused a controlled release of reservoir. That subsequently been repaired and that was just completed last week. On the regulatory side, the first few days after the flood were largely spent at our flood control facilities and chasing down some from fire drills at some of the regulated dams. Once we were able to get our bearings, we pulled together a rapid inspection program and used emergency management assistance compact getting in staff from the North Power Authority in New York Dam Safety and Mass Dam Safety to perform roughly 309 dam inspections across the state over the following two weeks. That's helped us to categorize which dams took damage which did not, and then really focus on the highest risk areas and the dams took the most damage from the event. From this we performed all of inspections roughly 65 on dams that take damage during the event that needed additional work. And from the events, we had five dams that reached or failed. Two significant hazard dams and three low hazard dams and thankfully we had no high hazard dams failed. And the next few slides have some images of a few of the dams that failed. Dams mill dam in Washington failed. It was unfortunately slated for removal next year and it did not beat it by a year. Moving on, these are some of their dams that failed to put in lower dam walling for Clarkson Mill Dam and Cabot clients, Dam and Peru and then Dalpont Dam in Middlebury actually did not technically fail and they didn't release the reservoir in a controlled way but it nearly did. Thankfully the dams was there to kind of save the day on that facility. So from there, we've been working on roughly 50 of these dams that were damaged during the event doing things like increase emergency action planning, working through owners, the owners to be temporary repairs, increase monitoring and risk reduction measures. And at this point, the first three cost estimates of the damage is a very cursory based on the work we've done so far so that storm maintenance roughly at $600,000 is how much it's gonna take to get things back into play. A temporary stabilization one million and then the dams that were damaged during the event up to full limits to be a fully compliant safe dam, roughly 16 million. Again, these are very early estimates yet. And I think I'm at time but I just want to quickly review the most recent storm event that we had overall our dams likely performed very well that includes our dams, A&R dams as well as our regulated base. There was a snow on Rain and Bend, which is difficult to predict. And thankfully they performed pretty well areas with the highest snow pack early the areas that were most impacted. And I just want to note, I think most of what we'll think here is that Waterbury reservoir actually got within four inches of the level we were in July. And it's interesting that in 2023, the fourth and sixth ice pools and facility history happened. And then in the last 12 years, we've had the third, fourth, fifth and sixth. So we're seeing a lot more floods at that facility than before they have our history. That's why I have that. Yeah, I bet we have questions for you. And I see Representative Burke. Go ahead. Did you have your hand up? I do. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, well, a couple of things. One is that, you know, we heard a lot about the rights field. Is there any way to increase capacity that Dan given the predictions for, you know, more and more rain events? And then the other question was interest. Heard that program about the floodplain in Waterbury that the state was trying to acquire a family who didn't want to sell. So I just wondered what this data says that was. I can't speak to the floodplain issue in Waterbury. That's outside of my preview perhaps on the colleagues can. At Riceville, I would say increasing capacity while it would be nice to do, I think it would be challenging requiring more land. We own the state owns the quote unquote flowage rights up to the up to the spillway into the dam crest, but we don't own land beyond that. So if we were to increase the capacity, we'd have to acquire additional lands. And one thing to consider is that whenever you increase the capacity of the dam, you'll also want to increase the risk of not even backing in more water. I think of opportunities at Riceville to add some functional, some operate operational capacity that we don't currently have. It would have been helpful pre, during and post flood. That would have improved the system's performance provide us a little bit more breathing from there. I think that's probably where the, where the mines best spend, but where we're engaging with the courts. Look at that. And I don't think, I think we'll only make rocks on turn. All right, thank you. Okay, one more. And then we have to move on. Representative Pat. Thank you. I'm very familiar with Riceville because I was just upstream from there, but also from an energy perspective. I'm curious how many of the dams have hydro generation? Roughly a hundred dams in the state have hydro, roughly 80 regulated by FERC and roughly 20 by total utility commission registered, essentially on power. I am familiar that in times like this when it's very high water, the hydro plan at Riceville has to shut down because to run that much water through the turbines would blow the turbines apart, so. Right. Thank you for your testimony and for your work on behalf of Vermonters. And can you just briefly tell us how many people are in your section? Right now we have a total of five. Okay. And I bet you all were on overtime significantly in July. So thank you. Yes. Thank you very much for that. Thanks. I think now we have then the young. Young. That's correct. All right. Thank you. I'm going to try to start sharing my screen. And can I just ask, do you see this in presentation mode on your end? We see, not quite. We're seeing kind of the big slide and the small slide. We're seeing these notes, yeah. Small slide, okay. Let me try to undo that then. How about that? Is that better? Oh, we still see your notes. How about that? Yeah, that got it. Beautiful. I'm going to bring a laser pointer into view. Can you see that moving around? We can. Lovely. Okay. First of all, thank you so much for having us today and for the opportunity to speak with you. I'm very disappointed I can't be with you in person, but I'm equally happy that I tested and found out that I do have COVID and that I'm not a super spreader right when you guys least need that. Thank you for that. For bearing with me right now online, I'll try to be as clear as I can and hope that the electrons are moving quickly. So I am Ben Dillon. I am the Vermont State Geologist and the Director of the Vermont Geological Survey. I am going to be speaking about the summer that we just experienced before from the perspective of our hillsides and specifically speaking to the landslides that we all heard about plenty in the media. I work with just two other people in my division. Since we're so small, I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce ourselves to you. So it is myself as director. I work closely with John Kim, who has been with us since the mid 90s. And then also with Dr. Peter Strand, who joined us in our limited service position on July 17. So putting that on our timeline, Dr. Strand had quite an onboarding experience and jumped right in with both feet. And in fact, came up to speed quickly and got licensed with the FAA to fly this drone to give us some aerial perspective on some of these hazards, which was just fantastic. So before I jump right into the actual landslides, I wanted to quickly speak a bit to the storm. Does this animate on your end? Can you see this moving? It does, yeah. Okay, so this is just simple radar showing how this storm propagated. And it came up from the Southwest. And these Southwest moving storms tend to be flowing over very warm and humid air. And so they can carry more moisture along with them. And you can see it moving kind of unhindered up this direction until we come into Vermont right about in here. We start to see a disturbance. And the storm kind of breaks up and then and kind of circulates over Vermont for an extended period of time. Okay, this is what caused a really high precipitation amounts over Vermont. There was a high pressure system up into Canada that was essentially blocking this, by the way. And the best way that I have heard this storm described is as a juicer. So as this thing was moving to the North and then it was essentially blocked and circulating over Vermont, it was encountering what we are so lovingly see here along most of the state, our green mountains. And so those green mountains were sticking up as promontories and essentially juicing that storm and squeezing the moisture and the precipitation out of that storm. And that fell over just as Ben Green just shared with you. It dropped principally over the green mountains and almost had something like a reverse or a graphic effect where it mostly fell in the eastern flank of the green mountains. And so this rendering on the right is very similar to what Ben showed you that the National Weather Service produced. This one was produced by our partner, George Springston at Norwich University. And it just interpolates from each of these weather rain gauges rather here, what that precipitation looked like over the state. And sure enough, it really, our greatest rain amounts were right to the east of and over the spine of the green mountain. So I'm gonna take that same visual and on the next slide, I'm gonna show you where we had requests to visit based on landslide hazards. And just as you might have imagined, those locations highlighted at the scale of a town in bold were right in those pockets where we received the greatest amounts of precipitation. So that rain fell from July 9 to 11 on July 12th. I emailed my boss then commissioner, John Bealing and tried to just plant the seed that we might start to see some landslides. I said all, you know, all attention has understandably been in our flooded areas in the state, but that starting today, this will begin pivoting to the hills and adjacent areas experiencing erosion and landslide hazards. And so I asked that he just let me know if he hears about these things. At the time, I thought perhaps we'd see, you know, five or six landslides, I had no clue that this was gonna kick off two months of pretty significant effort from my division. So by the numbers, I have 81 sites that we were requested to go visit. These are ones that did pose some significant hazards. We had quite a few other sites that turned out to not be hazardous and folks just wanted another eye on it. So we responded to quite a few and we recognized very early on that we needed a very effective way to communicate these hazards in order to, as Secretary Moore said, to ensure a fast and effective response. So we stood up a categorization schema for these, kind of like our dams, one through four, where a one would recognize that, yes, a significant landslide had occurred or there was signs of incipient sliding, but there was no further immediate risk or action required. So in this case, this is an example from Wolcott where this person did experience quite a landslide on their property. However, upon inspection above and adjacent to the surface, which happened to have been a spring, we didn't see any additional hazards. And so we told that individual they could continue to use their house and in fact start doing some cleanup efforts. If we still saw signs that something was unstable, that would be elevated to a two. And these are those sites where we suggested that either ongoing monitoring was required or some sort of a mitigation strategy to fix those slopes. Not necessarily a hazard that required evacuation, but certainly some more attention needed. If something was labeled a three upon our first inspection, we were asked by Secretary Moore to not allow it to remain a three. A three would suggest that it is still unstable and it needs to be evaluated by state fire and safety to see if that parcel or any structures improvements on it need to be evacuated. So when we saw something and said, okay, this needs to be evaluated immediately by state fire and safety, we would either invite them in and elevate that to a four and evacuate the structure or we would identify some sort of a mitigation or monitoring strategy and reduce that to a two. And then of course, the worst case scenario are those that had failed or showed very obvious signs of incipient failure, where we would ask folks to get out of any structures on site and the local fire safety officials would put a red tag on those facilities. So by the numbers, again, we've been to, this number is actually out of date. Again, it keeps changing because we get more requests. I think it is now 82, but by the numbers, the lion share, these are the numbers that we're looking for. These are ones, which is a good thing. We have mostly sites where we have identified no additional hazards or risks associated. However, we do still have quite a few twos that we have already identified as being unstable. The owners know that there is still some lingering instability and that more mitigation or more monitoring or mitigation is needed. We've also had 11 facilities now that have been a four. So eight of those are residential structures where we are supporting with a buyout through a FEMA program working with our partners at Vermont Emergency Management. So what we have learned is that in order for us to respond with any sort of speed, fast and efficient response, we really needed to increase our coordination efforts. We, again, are only a team of three and we have no dedicated staff to this sort of work. We don't have a hazards division like some other state geological surveys have. So this sort of in order here started with, first, very closely working with the State Emergency Operations Center. I was up very early in the mornings understanding what requests came in overnight and communicating our plan for the day for visiting sites. And then again, late evening to recap what we had found during our site visits and then queuing up our site visits for the next day. It also, we were very fortunate to work right from the get go with our university partner at Norwich, George Springston, who is undoubtedly one of the state's most premier landslide experts. He has assembled an inventory of landslides around the state and there are over 3,000 of those that we have inventory. So this is not a new thing. The magnitude certainly is new. We were also able to deputize, so to speak, two prior Vermont Geological Survey staff members back in. These folks had been in a limited service position in the past and they had moved on to other state programs for permanent positions. But they could hit the ground running so that we could have multiple teams going different directions, which was a huge advantage for us after only having one car for some time. We also worked... I was going to ask if they made no mistake. First, we had VTrans. We were able to get some geotechnical assistance from VTrans. We also were able to borrow some structural engineering support from the Urban Search and Rescue Team. And then we were working closely as well with the Department of Public Safety, VEM. And like Ben Green and the Dam Safety Program, we're able to enact an emergency management assistance compact request to bring in four geotechnical staff from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to revisit 24 sites that we had... Essentially, they were in that category of two, and we were trying to understand the timeframe of the lingering hazards at some of these sites. So again, just to reiterate Secretary Moore's messaging here, enabled this coordination that we stood up, enabled our faster and more effective response, and we are trying to institutionalize this as a landslide task force going forward to make sure that if and when this happens again, we'll be better prepared. And I just want to quickly highlight for folks what fast and effective means to us. And I'm going to use this case study in Berry, Vermont, where this view here shows a walking path. This was formerly a rail bed used for the granite industry. It is now just an informal walking path that's maintained by local residents. This is what it looked like in June of 2023. The 11th, so right as the sun is starting to come out again over Vermont, we start to see this feature forming right on the surface of this walking path. An hour and a half later, that feature looks like this. And by another hour after that, it failed. And so these two photographs on the lower part of this image show what this looks like after a rotational landslide failure. You can see the headscarf right here, which starts as one of these. These are called tension cracks. It shows that the slope is in tension pulling away. When we hear from folks that a tension crack has formed, we operate under the assumption that it's going to fail quickly as this one did. So when we say fast and effective, we'd really like to be able to respond within the day, not within the week or certainly not two weeks. I just want to quickly throw in here that this is not something I think is a one-off. I think this is something we can plan on happening. Again, hopefully not to this magnitude, but it's certainly possible. And the NOAA puts out these climate summaries for states. This is from 2022 for Vermont. They put out these key messages. And I've read these messages many, many times. I've included them in presentations, but it wasn't until the storm event that I realized just how related these key messages are. So key message number one, temperatures have risen three degrees Fahrenheit since the beginning of the 20th century. Warmer air carries more water. Annual average precipitation has increased nearly six inches since the 1960s. That's a lot of water. That's a lot of water on our landscape and on our infrastructure. But then key message number three really pulls all of these together. Extreme weather events, particularly floods and severe storms are having a stronger impact on Vermont. At the same time, multi-year meteorological and hydrological droughts continue to pose challenges for water dependent sectors. Typically in July, that is what I am heavily focused on is helping support some of our municipalities finding up water to supply their constituents, particularly in the Northeast Kingdom. We have several different municipalities we're supporting and trying to find groundwater resources. So we tend to be in this world of extremes right now where it's Feast or Fam, right? That last comment there, extreme rainfall events are projected to become more frequent and intensive in the future. I think we're seeing that. And I think that we haven't seen this magnitude. I know for a fact, we have not seen this magnitude of landsliding in the past. And this may just be a sign of what's to come. So to quickly summarize for you folks, first of all, this really was historic. I've been sort of referring to this as the 1927 flood of landslides. I think this is the one we're going to be measuring future events against. And it really did expose our susceptibility to these things. For us to be responsive requires, first of all, capacity. Again, just reiterating, we are a survey of three with no dedicated staff to geologic hazards. In order to do this, then, again, requires this very close coordination and working with geologists, geotechnical and structural engineers and Department of Public Safety folks to make sure that we bring the right expertise to bear as remunters need it. And then I added this third bullet here, well-defined roles and responsibilities. We became the go-to folks for landslides and we're almost operating as first responders for folks. And as such, there was almost like a degree of imprinting that went on. And so when we responded to folks and I gave them my card, for example, they would call for pretty much any questions they had after that time. And some of this is outside of my lane. And I'm not necessarily the right person to go to for support with FEMA and things like that. So as we stand up this landslide task force, we're trying to better define what we can do and what we cannot do for folks. When I think about our challenges ahead, I kind of put them into the two biggest here, two biggest buckets. One, how do you handle those hazardous parcels that are not eligible for FEMA support? All those twos that I referred to earlier, we have now been to these parcels. We have identified hazards and the owners now know that there is still some instability associated with their properties and they have a lot of concern, understandably. But now how do we go forward from there and how do we identify resources for these folks? And then number two, we ultimately, the question is gonna become, what do we do about this? And I think like any problem, the first thing we have to do is really understand it and identify where we do have the susceptibility and then we need to manage that information, right? Once we know, once we can map out and model where we have landslide susceptibility, we have to use that information carefully. Some folks might not like a map that shows their parcel lighting up on a susceptible domain. And we need to be sure that we are both protective of human health and property, but also protective of people's properties and assets there too. So I think that's it and I got through the whole thing without coughing, which is amazing. I don't know if I have time for questions or not, but I'm happy to take them if I do. Thank you for your presentation and the same acknowledgement for you and your team for serving Vermont during this incredible event that we had. Actually, I need to check in with ANR. We are seeming to run out of time. I have three other people scheduled from the ANRMDEM and really we should be wrapping up by 315 to be respectful to the next witnesses. So we may need to reschedule with some of you and I will perhaps leave it to you too. Yes ma'am, what do you have at 315? It's not a continuation through our time. We have the agency of transportation joining us. I guess our options are to take two and a half minutes of peace or we can prioritize here. I think we should prioritize. I would suggest we do Rob Evans next and then we may have to reschedule the next two witnesses. Okay, we'll talk about that. Yeah, okay, great. You up next here, get rolling on the screen okay, right? Thank you madam chairs and committee for having me in today. I'm Rob Evans, I manage the Rivers Program, the ANRDPC watershed manager today. Talk about the regulatory and technical assistance work the program does with respect to resilience. Thank you for starters and bear with me, he'll be quick but we need to go on the way back machine to look at what this general assembly folks before you were considering after the floods of the 1990s in similar positions you all wondering what the path forward is giving the widespread destruction. The post-mortem report, the Act 137 report of 1999 with Marion findings but an important one set in motion the programs I'm going to talk about today. So it's really important to start there. And really it was understanding at that time that flood related erosion was a primary mode of flood damage for us, not just flooding innovation. Dynamic rivers and stable rivers were a widespread problem. We still have rivers recovering today from a legacy of dredging, burman straining and armor as broadly under the bucket of real channelization practices, something that we've done for decades and decades after every flood. Take the channel deeper, keep all flood water in the channel and set it downstream faster. That's not flood recovery, that's not flood resilience, it's a recipe for repeated disasters and that's what we've experienced. That's what the Act 137 report summarized. When we dredge rivers, we keep more water in the channel. Rivers then erode downward or vertically further with larger flood flows. So we have larger floods contained with the channel where the river starts to widen as it wants to meander and flatten it slow and reconnects to flood plain. That is the destructive river system. This is a great slide from my colleague at the Nature Conservancy, Shane Jayquith. It really shows the distinction between what we want which is that top cross section there which is rivers being able to access their flood plains. They should do that during the one to two year flood with an annual flood. That's the river's treasurer we felt. Where a river can get out under the flood plain, spread out, slow down, store flood waters, deposit cell and debris versus what you see in the bottom cross section which is a dug out channelized river. There's nothing slowing that water down. Usually associated with that deep end channel as a steep end channel. And that is what has caused and continued to cause a lot of beaches of river. Tremendous destruction, even investments private and public alike. In the early 2000s as my program was created it didn't exist in the 1990s but it was created in the late 90s with both federal hazard mitigation funding from FEMA as well as water funding from the state. Some of you may remember the Clean and Clear program. With those funding sources and partners, consultants and regional planning commissions, we endeavored to assess the physical condition of thousands of miles of the laundry. And to put a finer point on what we thought we already knew which was 75% of our rivers assessed for disconnecting from their flood plains. The term you see up down the slide is incised. That means energized. That means disconnected and not accessing the flood plain. And this data set really set in motion further decisions and evolution of programs I'm gonna talk about here. So first let's talk about one of my regulatory programs a stream alteration permitting program. That's e-stream work activities within the river channel. Act 110 in 2010 changed the jurisdictional trigger. Significantly, six-fold increase in stream miles regulated. Now we regulate all perennial stream miles which are the majority of them on. So that was significant. Second, a session after Irene 2012, Act 138 provided us a much needed emergency authority. We had no ability to limit bridging flood recovery work in the river channels. We had no ability or enforcement ability to deal with that. And there was significant overworking and over-dredging of our streams after I think close to 80 miles of river. But in a more dangerous situation ahead of the rest of it. So that was significant to give that authority that we now have. And some stats from this most recent flood as a result we have issued over, well, specifically, I checked this morning from the database, 330 emergency protective and next flood measure authorizations. And here's the thing that I want everyone to appreciate. A lot of those authorizations are for dredging and armor. But it's the minimum necessary to protect human investments and to put channel capacity back to pre-flood in the subplots are threatened to open up channels of stream of bridges and culverts so they can flow freely. The minimum necessary as opposed to indiscriminate miles that image you see right there is after Irene. It's a National Guardsman under orders, almost underwater dangerous for him and creating more dangerous river. Well-intentioned, but not in recovery. Another significant milestone that we hit after Irene, it's a years long process attached to the hip with the trans and the water where you can see management was a negotiation with FEMA to get them to approve and acknowledge our stream alteration rule as codes and standards. What that means is when culverts and bridges are destroyed by flooding, they will pay with their public assistance funding to put the right size, upside structure for years, the standard for that program was to put back in kind of what was blown out. So if it was an undersized culvert, that's what FEMA would pay to put back. Now they have to meet our sizing criteria. So what does that mean? In addition to hydraulic sizing criteria, they need to meet our geomorphic sizing criteria. Secretary Moore mentioned it earlier. The key parameter there, there are a number of them, but it's that bank fold with that natural channel. That is a really important dimension. Because what that allows the crossing structure to do is pass sediment and debris. Those things that will build up upstream of undersized structure and result in a catastrophic blowout. Additionally, coming out of the Irene legislative session, we're directed to start up a training program in partnership with the trans and our Department of Fish and Wildlife. We set up the rivers and roads training, multi-tiered training. We offer it annually. Since 2012, we have run 860 individuals and 48 of us. As recently as last fall, I'm spinning up this month for another set of trainings. And really the key takeaway there is that understanding and working with river processes improves flood resilience. For those designing, constructing, repairing, replacing transportation infrastructure. And I guess I'll close with in-stream work and stream alterations to say that the increase in our jurisdiction that we've got is from Act 110 and 2010. The emergency authorities we got after Irene Act 138 coupled with a broader knowledge base out there by practitioners and designers of how to work in rivers has made a difference. Since Irene did not see large-scale dredging, damaging, unauthorized and discriminated dredging, nor have we had requests. There's still some drumbeat out there. The paradigm hasn't fully shifted. There's still folks that think dredging is a solution, but we are in a better place. We have made headway. Okay, I want to pivot to land uses now. So we're getting out of the river channel and we're thinking about river bottom lanes. We've made some incremental gains since 2008 in regulating flood hazard areas and river corridors. Find those in a second. And we've tried to impart in a myriad patchwork of jurisdictional authorities a no adverse impact framework. A no adverse impact framework is important. The National Flood Insurance Program, which is the basis of most town regulations, 90% of towns are involved, it's an insurance program that's focused on reducing risk to insurable buildings. It's not looking at whether that new development in a flood plain is gonna cause increased hazards to others. So a no adverse impact looks at not only how do we reduce risk or avoid risk for new development, but will that new development increase flood elevations, flood velocities, will it exacerbate erosion? It's not the side of the coin. Thank you about people that are already there. We don't want to make the situation worse. It's a little bit more time on the slide because these are terms that are defined in statute and in rural flood hazard area that red, the law you see on the map there, that is the FEMA mapped inundation flood hazard area, regulatory flood plain, what's under water during the 1% annual chance flood and 100 year flood. 90% of towns regulate that at the minimum as they participate in flood insurance. We have dialed up those standards through model bylaws for towns, they're optional. We recommend they dial up inundation standards for the flood hazard areas. And then in addition, we recommend that the towns regulate river corridors. River corridors are mapped by my program, by our agency, directed to do so by ICON-38. We've been doing so in a limited fashion prior to 2012. The river corridor is, it's not really showing just what's under water under one particular flood event. It's really that meander space our river needs over time. That's minimum valley bottom space the river needs to meander to a road, positive sediment, and to really come up with a least evosive slope. And it's like an important planning to, for citing the development. So it's quick to walk through the patchwork of jurisdictions. Again, most land uses are still regulated by towns. 90% of towns are in the flood insurance program. Since 2008, when we started offering model bylaws with higher standards, 97 towns have adopted higher standards. The standards are variable. Sometimes they adopt everything we recommend. It's an entire century pick. Of those 97, 29 towns are regulating town-wide river corridors as mapped by the agency. So managing the regulating for river in erosion and trying to keep the investments out of that meander space. Then we have Act 250, Criterion 1D. We looked at the corridors and flood hazard areas that state authority as well. We have a procedure with embedded no adverse impact criteria similar to the model bylaws. We make regulatory recommendations to district commissions. We don't issue the permits, they do, but the advice now based on development proposals. And then the last one, the newest one is our state flood hazard area and river corridor rule. It came online in 2015. Regulates a subset of activities that are exempt from municipal regulations like the state buildings and facilities. Required adequate practices, et cetera. And this is where we have our no adverse impact standards more formally codified and our program issues permits under this rule. As we were trying to embed in these various regulatory authorities and no adverse impact framework, we had to come up with a river corridor mapping to serve that since that's a key priority for us. It's managing for river dynamics. So we published in 2015 a statewide river corridor map layer. It's available online on the ANR Natural Resources Atlas. It covers about 14,000 miles of river and stream. That's significant. The maps today cover about 20% of our river miles. Whereas our river corridor mapping was 75%. Again, an important planning tool, regulatory tool to avoid great risky development in dynamic river valleys. And lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight quickly the non-regulatory work of my team, river scientists that provide myriad partners, technical assistance on river restoration, floodplain restoration projects, conservation easement work, et cetera. That's a segue perhaps VEM when they get to come up and present the best projects for years as Secretary Moore highlighted, are done with a combination of hazard mitigation dollars and clean water funds to do buyouts, to reconnect river channels, to floodplains, to plant riparian trees, upsides culverts, et cetera. Off repeated statement is what's good for flood resilience and coordination is good for water quality and vice versa. That's that, I'll leave it there. I think you wanna move on and set up questions. Do folks have, we could maybe see if there's time for one or two if folks have a question. Brett, who? Brett Burke, I have a question. Oh, that's right. Representative Burke, you had a question that was for the floodplain, for Mr. Evans, about the Waterbury floodplain. Waterbury question? About that floodplain, that ever gonna be a possibility? And it's really up to the land owner. I was involved with some of that, including hiring a consultant that did the work to evaluate the Winooski through Waterbury. And the thought was that Winooski Street Bridge was backing water up through the village. The consultant found that just downstream railroad and bank is on one side is a key property where reconnecting floodplain and lower flood elevations as you perhaps also heard. That project doesn't happen without the land owner's permission. But it speaks, I think, to a bigger question that should be considered, which is if we're valuing for broader societal benefit floodplain function, lowering flood elevations, storing floodwaters. How do we pay for that in a way that really accounts for all of those ecosystem services and broader societal benefits? Maybe if the pot was a little sweeter for that land owner, maybe they'd say yes. I don't know, I'm just... Great work. And with apologies to Stephanie Smith and Marion Wolts, we will find time to hear from you and sorry about the miscommunication around how much time there was. We are gonna take a... No, no break. I'm gonna break. Well, we're gonna transition. I think we'll have time for let's take a break. Take a bio break, but we're gonna transition and it's really just a transition because we know people's tummies start rumbling and they wanna wiggle. So if you have to get up and move around, please do, but we're gonna invite the folks from VTrans to come up and I think while we're in this transition, so why don't we pause the live stream? Live stream. Okay, it looks like we're live. So welcome back everyone. We're continuing with our joint meeting at the House Transportation and House Environment and Energy Committee. So I think this morning, this afternoon, we've had a really great setup from the state climatologist and then hearing from the folks at A&R about flood resiliency, the flooding from July and more recently in December. And we really kind of wanted to round out a conversation to hear from the Agency of Transportation and I just wanted to say, we have Secretary Flynn here with us today and a number of your members of your team and I just wanted to publicly thank you and your team. There were over something like 262 emergency projects that happened throughout communities in Vermont and VTrans was everywhere and I got those daily reports and when we talk about the impact of climate change on our infrastructure, transportation infrastructure is so often impacted, our bridges, our roads. And I just want to thank you and your team for the work. I know it was a summer not filled of those planned summer vacations that you all had. So thank you and thank you for being with us here today. And so I wanted to turn it over to Andrea Wright who's been doing some really terrific work around resilience. So Andrea, tell us how you wanna, we have until 4.30. So I was thinking that we'd hear from you and then we'd have questions after from the two committees. Does that work for you to proceed that way? Just a little bit. Great. Great to share with you. Yeah, I think questions at the end would be great. Great. So please take it away. Happy new year. Great. Thank you for having me. It's for I provide this overview of VTrans resilience work. My name is Andrea Wright. I'm the environmental policy manager in the policy planning and development division at VTrans and I'm here with A is Ashley Afton. She's the manager within our district maintenance and fleet division. And also Jeremy Reed who is our content chief engineer and the director of the highway division. Welcome. So I just wanted to kick things off here by setting a stage in a really broad sense. There's a lot going on at VTrans. Resilience, some of those things are institutionalized and some are definitely newer and evolving. All of these things are really evolving. Well, we really strive to work in and keep ahead of the change that we're experiencing. Kind of lump our resilience efforts into different buckets and these are the four buckets. We need categories that we are looking at when we're talking about resilience efforts at VTrans. So for emergency response and recovery, we have our constituity of operations plan. So this really involves assessing all agency mission critical central functions and analyzing how to continue these functions safely and efficiently and effectively. We have an incident management system that VTrans has adopted that uses the incident man system which is an organizational structure that helps us to manage indirect agencies, response and recovery priorities. So how information flows, how resources are allocated during events, how tactical decisions are made during those events. We have a federal highway emergency response manual that really outlines actions and responsibilities for staff during an event really from the very onset to the very end. We have emergency procurement contracting and these procedures make it possible to quickly hire consultants and contractors if additional support is needed, which it almost always is, to get those responses. And we should encourage them. No, I'm trying to do our mask. It's possible. And planning and programming resilience is addressed through our larger systems plans like our long range transportation plan. Our asset management plan is addressed in our freight plan and our transit plans sort of all the way throughout and certainly in our resilience improvement plan which I'll talk about later. We also provide training, Rob mentioned training and education in partnership with ANR. We have developed tools. We've worked with ANR to develop that rivers and roads training program that Rob mentioned. We've developed a transportation resilience planning tool and a repeat damages tool that I'll get into a little bit more later. And then for programming, resilience has been incorporated in our project's selection and prioritization systems. For design and engineering, we've worked with ANR to update our design standards in our hydraulics manual to accommodate that bane full width. Again, Rob spoke to that, which helps us to make sure that these structures are designed to pass degree, which is often the cause of failure during events. So if our structure is more resilient, it also brings our standards and our designs into alignment with ANR standards. To encourage flood resilient local roads, we've developed town, highway, road and bridge standards. Again, Rob mentioned these. We did that in partnership with ANR and then towns can voluntarily adopt those and that results in a lessened match for them as well as for reimbursement for building to a higher standard and a resilient durable standard under the FEMA-PA program. For infrastructure investments, we have our traditional funding, of course, for all of our bridge designs, our culvert replacements, slope stability types of projects. We have new funding through the IIDA protect program and there's a formula program for that. This is also the grant program. We also look for opportunities to apply for FEMA resilience really until we have several projects going right now in a variety of those different programs. So again, this is really just a very broad overview of our activities and each of us will go into more detail about several aspects of our work as I relate to these categories. And so with that, I will hand it over to Ashley. She'll provide more detail on our response efforts, especially from this past year. And then Jeremy will discuss our design standards. And then I will wrap things up with some of our planning efforts related to the recent funding programs. All right, thank you so much, Andrea. Hi, Ashley, welcome. Yes, thanks. Again, my name is Ashley Atkins. I am a manager within the district maintenance and sleep division. Today, I will be presenting on recovery efforts of funding this past year. We'll be going into the depth of the events. I wanted to give an opportunity to talk briefly about some of the tools that are utilized in the program sharing event. As you may know, we have state-maintained burglaries that turn around 2,700 miles. Then we have town-maintained burglaries which is broken into class 1, 2, 3, 4. Class 1s are state routes that are now maintained by the municipality. Typically, you're more urban areas where you're major routes traveling through. And during disaster, all town-maintained burglaries that are not federal aid routes are part of female public assistance, female PA. All federal aid routes are in the FHWA ER program. Do you mind explaining some of the... The Transportation Committee is familiar with the acronyms from the transportation world. So just like FHWA is... Yeah, it's the federal highlights and then emergency relief. Great. I just want for the Environment and Energy Committee may have a different world of acronyms. I'm saying that. We're talking about acronyms because we have ICS, but it's like a main structure. So V-Trans, my APC transportation has volunteered, has had staff volunteer to serve the various roles required to deploy ICS and have regular training requirements, including participation in the 2019 statewide multi-day emergency response exercise. The ICS was utilized in the July event along with a response to our only 2019 site and to manage the agency's role under COVID-19 state of emergency. In July, each of... In the July event, each of the five maintenance regions, which you can see in all the different colors here, the Brown Aviation Plan and the TIC, which is the Transportation and Transportation Center, we're all set up, it's going out of it. One dashboard that you'll most likely see when walking into a command structure would be the common operating picture that I show on this slide. This tool is very helpful in giving a snapshot over the figures on what exactly the traffic and traffic levels were at any point during that storm. It's very similar to the 511 and doing the 501 map. This one's more specific equal as far as what the road conditions are, closures, how many miles are closed, versus how many miles are partially open. Another dashboard that is utilized during events is the Total Transportation Instructor Damage dashboard. This information is from preliminary damage assessments that the state conducted in the first day of the long event called the In-Town Roadways that have recorded damage. The dashboard is linked to an application with representative layers to categorize the estimates of the correct programs. That's that FEMA public assistance versus the FHWA ER, with FEMA being on the left, which is based by county threshold and FHWA being on the right. In smaller events, this information is utilized to determine if a state will be requesting a declaration. On the first event, on July 7th, extensive rain fell in the southern part of the state, resulting in area road closures, and a landslide closing major east-west route, and a state route set route four. Two days later, a state emergency declaration was made by Governor Phil Scott. On Sunday afternoon, July 9th, some evidence likely had an excessive rain associated threat to property and public safety. That's traffic flash flooding and area flooding, area river flooding, if there are any questions. Most wide-spread instances were damaged and buried because of prolonged heavy rain fall during the long 10th and 11th. The rainfall amounts of three to nine inches were observed across the state over that 48-hour period. In addition to the figures on the screen, AOT is estimating damage totals for the July event of over 300 million, including both FIMA and FHWA. 29 temporary bridge requests were sent in from the towns. 14 state-owned and three residential bridges have been deployed to date. 12 feet crass were withdrawn or put on hold, and the majority of the withdrawn request were from the town, deciding to move forward with the repairs. To break down the total estimate of 300 million, the average WAER is estimating 374 projects, 157 million. It's 352 emergency repairs and 73 permanent repairs. Base FIMA damage estimates are estimating around 112 million. FIMA has requested that AOT utilize as an inflation factor on some of these categories as that inflation factor prior. So the inflation factor that was utilized in the initial calculations was dated. And as our project worksheets are finalized, the FIMA damage estimates will be updated to include the inflation factor. FIMA's cost can be broken into five different project groups, public assistance, the bird removal, rail, rail trails, and the US 302 complex building. We'll start off with the Memorial Valley Rail Trail. The Memorial Valley Rail Trail had a grant opening scheduled for July 15th. Unfortunately, we did not open it on July 15th. Significant damage occurred. The Memorial Valley Rail Trail estimated at 16 million repairs. The majority of the damages were concentrated in the Memorial and Caledonia counties, where the hardest hit towns being Hardwick and Wilcox. 138 individual sites were damaged and 93 miles were cleared. 79 and a half miles have been opened with 14.7 miles soon to be opened very soon. For rail trail damages, are estimated at 70 million statewide state-owned rail lines have damage at 237 sites. All rail roads are open and operational. At this time, it was worked on 105 of those sites completed. An additional permanent work on 55 sites are still on board. The damages spanned 123 miles of the 298 state-owned rail line, if you saw. Yeah. You've seen some of these. Yeah, pretty dramatic. Yes. The U.S. re-emphasizing complex building, six structures were impacted, with one being a total loss. Fourteenth central garage vehicles were impacted, with 11 being damaged and three were a total loss. For some of our teams that needed to be relocated, the A&C's facilities team has been displaced to Dill and Fair City Place. The training center and the Vermont local roads is displaced and separated, but to Fair City Place and district maintenance, the capital region has relocated to the Dill complex. Some pictures of the federal highway routes for the damage that we had. This is in Cavendish, the Mount 106. Redding 106, where you can see the spring was intended to go to the bridge to the left. So I'm going to go a little bit more to the right. And also 106, one of the many landslides that have occurred. Human disrepair, we have come with a lot of work in a very short timeframe. In addition to the strain, one of the many agency successes was restoring the Amtrak service. Service was restored to all state-owned rail lines in five weeks. To recap on the response timeline, an initial coverage event, the state completes the necessary restrictions of all state-owned railways. Within the following weeks of this form, the state does each of the management speciality tours offline in the RRR. The federally funded roadways that condense the total sites to 360-accessible sites. And of these 360-accessible sites, 65 sites remain, all of the work is completed, which has put us in a great position for recovery. And then we've had a warm wet summer. In several areas across the state, the weather set new factors for temperatures and rainfall in December 18th. 2.2 inches of rain in Burlington, which formed the previous factor of 0.85 inches set in 1954. Burlington also broke its temperature record of 39 degrees the set in 1996 to now 44. And Montclair beat its 50-degree temperature set in 1949 to 59 degrees. From our dam assessment that we have to date, estimates are around four million for FHWA and FEMA from the December flood. There was only 2700 feet damage sites from July to December. And of these did not have permanent repairs as of yet, or a vegetation that was fully reestablished. The overwhelming majority of the remaining sites were sediment, debris, filling, culverts, and bridges. And now I'll turn the presentation over to Aaron to talk more about structures. Thank you. Thank you, Ashley. Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the updates to our design standards. And obviously, we've talked about training in the roads through rivers and updating the hydraulic manual. And really, all of these efforts are resulting in three things. That is resiliency through upsizing our structures, whether it be structures or bridges or culverts. Resiliency through redundancy and then resiliency through designing deep foundations that's opposed to shallow foundations so that if there is tower, the structure stands. So speaking of culverts, this is what we've done in the picture that are a little small. But here's an example of an eight foot culvert that was replaced by a 16 by six box culvert. And when we size these structures, we try to use a risk and proportionality for the asset, the roadway that it's on. So as an example, on the interstate, we check, make sure that the structure passes the 100 year flood event and that it passes the 200 year flood check. What that means is that there's no impediment to the passing of the water for the 100 year flood event and that the 200 year flood check does not over top the road. For state highways, we use 50 and 100 years and then local roads are 25 years and 100 years. We also heard from some of the previous presenters about the bank full width. So again, that's a minimum standard that we look at, a minimum span of at least bank full width. Likewise for bridges, we look at the bank full width, which is usually not an issue, but again, we look at the 100 year and 200 year flood events for interstate, 50 year flood events and 100 year flood check for state highways and 25 and 100 year for town highways. We also look to make sure that there's no adverse flood impacts up or downstream. So meaning we don't want to cause a dam that then in the dates and upstream structure. We also look for a scour and lateral forces for the hydraulics and make sure that the structure can withstand those forces for the prescribed flood event. So what does that look like? So this is a very high level slide that looks at how we populate our scour critical evaluations. And so we take information from four different sources, the bridge inspection data, agency natural resource phase one and phase two geomorphic assessment data, the transportation research planning tool and the USGS data. And we look at probability of event, consequence of event, the cost of upsizing or replacing those structures. And the prioritization within the capital program for those structures. And so this is a dashboard that is the byproduct of all of those inputs. And it has every scour critical bridge in the state, both state and local system. And what essentially scour critical means is that it either has a shallow foundation, it doesn't have adequate stone fill around the foundation or the foundation type is unknown. And so essentially it's not necessarily that there's a risk, it's that we can't take it off the list essentially. And so obviously you can see that the average age of these structures is about 80 years old. So this is an example of a deep foundation. And so many of you may be familiar with the Route 12 Bridging Bethel, next to the Gilead Brook. And so what was a historic laid up stone type of botnet in the middle of the channel, we replaced with two deep foundations that tried to span the channel. I think it's sort of everyone's seen historically you try to split the channel and that breaks up your span lanes. But that obviously causes the impediment to the channel. With that, I will turn it over to Julia. There's an easy plan. Thanks, Jeremy. Again, my name is Andrea Wright and I'm the environmental policy manager at the trans. I just wanted to describe a little bit of this new program that I'm making called the Environmental Policy Sustainability Program. We have been staffed just for about six months now. And this program really is involved in all topics, policy, whether it's for environment and transportation. So water quality, soils contamination, road ecology. But right now, with funding from the IFA through the National Electric Vehicle Instruction Program, the Carbon Reduction Program, and the Protected Resilience Program at the federal level and at the state level with the Climate Action Plan, Comprehensive Energy Plan and the state has a renovation plan. Our work is primarily focused on climate mitigation and adaptation and so. In that capacity, we just threw a few slides here on our recently developed resilience improvement plan on the day program. So following Tropical Storm Irene, it certainly was recognized that there is a need to identify areas that are vulnerable. A couple of tools that we have developed over the past few years that help with our resilience planning. We have the Transportation Resilience Planning Tool. This is a web-based application that identifies bridges, culverts, and roadways that are vulnerable to damage from floods. It estimates a risk based on vulnerability and criticality of those roadway segments. And then it also identifies potential mitigation measures based on the factors that are driving the vulnerability. It's been hours talking about the Transportation Resilience Planning Tool. We have also developed a reducing repeat damage tool. This grew out of the requirement from Federal Highway to track locations that have been damaged in multiple events. The tool includes individual damage records. So those BDIRs that Ashley mentioned that have been after a storm event at each location. So it highlights those repeat damage sites and it's a more of an interactive tool. It allows those that are familiar with the site with damage events. So they are just a staff who are there all the time and know what happens on the roadways on all types of events. They know what damage has occurred. They know what fixes have been implemented and they also have ideas for potential solutions. And it allows them to go in and interactively and put comments into that tool. So for resilience planning, there's clearly a need for resilience planning. Mr. from Ashley, we are definitely experiencing increased frequency and intensity of events. And I feel like I've been talking about that for years and I feel like it's getting more frequent and more intense. So we definitely need to be doing planning. We have this past year with a private capital. We had a lot of events, smaller events. Soils were saturated everywhere. And then we had a couple of days of really intense events and people's lives are upended for long periods of time. This is occurring more and more and we need to plan so that we can be more proactive. Of course, there's the resilience planning happening and a number of fronts throughout the state. We've got the climate action plan, the state has a mitigation plan that have laid out pathways and strategies for adaptation. We have FEMA and Vermont Emergency Management granting programs, A&R is addressing resilience through their watershed planning processes and plans. Municipalities have local hazard mitigation planning. And again, we have the tools that the agency has been working on over the past few years. So then enter the IRJA and provides Vermont with $37 million to address resilience in the transportation system. And the receiving guidance provides for state agencies to develop a resilience program. And that would guide and protect investments. So the plan is not mandatory, but if we complete a plan and it gets approved, then we receive an increased federal match for those resilience improvement projects that are identified in the plan. So with that incentive for us to have a decreased match and the opportunity to bring a lot of things that are happening throughout the state together as well as what's happening in the agency, we decided to move forward with a plan development. And the first step in that process was defining our hazards and understanding the vulnerabilities and risks that we're looking at throughout our transportation system. And so we didn't wanna do that in a silo. And so we invited stakeholders from our Federal Highway Administration from the Agency of Natural Resources Climate Action Office from the Building through General Services, from the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, Vermont Department of Health, of course Vermont Emergency Management and also the state oncologist to help us identify what was the most critical of hazard choices to be focusing on. And that is heading for us now. I know the state hazard mitigation plan is sort of expanding on their hazards. We probably will be looking to do that with future iterations of our results. But right now, certainly our highest hazard and thing to be looking out for is both from innovation, but more so by the nature of the way, our roads and the streams and the mountains around them from erosion. Our next step was then to define goals. This slide has a lot in it, but I also think it's good to show how we went from goals to measures and then to metrics. So our goal really is system resilience. We want to see less damage in the future. We want to be able to respond and recover more quickly. We want to ensure least disruption to and continued movement of people and goods. We especially want to focus on vulnerable populations. And we want to ensure that we're coordinated with what's going on at other state and local resilience planning efforts. So from there, a core component of our rip development was to develop a methodology to identify and really prioritize resilience opportunities that would align with these goals. So each goal has a measure, which is just a means of track and progress. Those measures are then translated to metrics. So we created definitions of what counts as high and then locations where those measures were high received a flag. And the plan uses a weighted methodology. It involves high risk sites as identified in that transportation resilience planning tool as well as documentation of our repeat damages. It looks at transit routes. It uses the Vermont Department of Health social vulnerability index to identify where vulnerable populations are. It looks at commodity points of distribution to support the distribution of goods during events but also to keep good moving and keep the economy moving when we have events. And then it also again looks at coordination with other state planning efforts. And all of that is to come up with a prioritized list of locations where we can invest these funds. And so through this methodology, there is the possibility of a location earning up to eight flags. And this is an example of the methodology at work. So we have a goal. We want to have less damage in the future. And that relates to the system measure. In this case, high risk locations are known and have been made more resilient. That's what we're aiming for. And then we have the metric. Again, in this case, it's the repeat damage locations. So if a location would receive one flag with the same asset had been damaged in two federally declared disasters and two flags that have been damaged in three or more. And so that's sort of that weighting. This is just one example of one of the metrics. We had metrics for the repeat damages. And then again, for high and very high transportation resilience planning tool scores or transit routes that also had high TRPT scores or social vulnerability areas that had high TRPT scores. They all received flags based on where they came out. Prioritization and those metrics. And again, the prioritization could result in up to eight flags. And so that methodology provides us with the ability to map our priorities. And we did them with the structures and for roadway settlements. We defined high risk locations as road segments that were assigned three or more flags and structures that were assigned two or more flags. So we have all of this data compiled now. And we are looking at locations with high number of flags. And then looking at that, initially, our first step is to harmonize those locations with our locations of capital projects. So projects that are already planned for their asset condition. Where can we put these funds towards hoping to improve those sites? We're also looking at the locations that are necessarily asset-driven and could be one of a standalone resilience-based project. So currently, we're working with our design groups, our project developers, to understand the program projects and look at the projects for the resilience components. And then we're looking also at those projects that don't have resilience components and seeing where we can incorporate them in the projects. One of the things that we need to do is determine eligible costs for those projects because the fund only cover the incremental cost of a project that are related to resilience. And so there's some figuring out that we have to know some coordination with federal highway and what those eligible costs are per project. So really, the takeaway here is that, although it shows that we have a lot of locations to address, it also shows that really addressing a relatively small portion of the network will have a large impact. So our next steps are really to just improve on what we did. We want to position ourselves for the tech and FEMA location funding grants. I mentioned there's a formal program for the tech. There's also discretionary grant programs. So we are looking to apply for those priority RIF locations that aren't right now along with our global projects, especially. We want to establish metrics to measure our resilience. We operate under a continuous improvement mindset at the agency. We want to plan, do, study, act. We want to know what our metrics are and track our progress towards addressing them so that we know that we met our goals that we're working towards our goals. We need to do a deeper dive into incorporating what we've learned here and what we've established into our agency plans. The law and constitution plan is up for renewal soon. We'll be looking at what we did here to incorporate that into there. And then we also just want to look at other state plans. Right now, we had sort of a low-hanging fruit with the watershed basin plans. They have transportation projects already identified in them. And so we were able to give flags to those sites that align with those. And we want to look at other state plans and work on bringing those into our prioritization method more. And that's what we had to share today. And do you pull that up to your question? Great. Thank you, Andrea, Ashley, and Jeremy. And this is great. And we do have time for some questions. I know I have a question and I imagine that there are some others I see here too. Earlier in the day, the state climatologist showed us a map that I don't know if you were here for that, but she showed a map that showed an overlay from like the 1927 flood and then Irene. And it was done by it's courtesy of Jonathan Croft at VTrans. And it showed from 1927 to 2011 that they were the same roads by and large. And so I know a question that I have been hearing and I'm just interested to hear about this tool and how you think about it. What does it take? Where do we have to reach a point to move a road? And is that, you know, I think that's one of the... Because I'm just saying, you know, it was really interesting to see the map with the overlays of that. And I'm just, you know, you have this new resiliency tool. But like, first, does VTrans track the money that's been spent over a span of time to like, you know, like, you know, in terms of how much has been spent on repairs from flood, you know, from weather events like flooding and then repairs. Like, you know, I think because I think at least that's where I feel like I'm sitting this session, like we're looking at some damage that's hit more recently, more frequently, massive infrastructure in the same area. So is that what that tool has done? Or like, where does VTrans, how do you approach that? Moving road, I'll leave that one to Secretary Blaine. Yeah, sorry, sorry. I think now I will say, obviously we're talking to other state agencies, and certainly, we're hearing that states that are on the coast more are looking at this investment and moving roads. I don't know if, well, certainly that's a challenge anywhere. I'll let you take it from there. Thank you, Secretary Flynn. Sure, Secretary of the Agency. It's a great question, and I can remember, you know, sitting in Delmerston during Tropical Storm, when I raised, when I worked with folks down there, and the question came up in two places, frankly, Wilmington and Route 107, miles of Route 107 between Bethel and the Gaysville road were gone, and they were completely gone. And there was a fleeting conversation in the many, many meetings we had throughout those four months when I lived there and about possibly moving 107 further up the hillside. But in the practical reality, it would take, and I don't throw this out to sound like a government person who just has reasons why something can't happen, but I've come to learn you have to at least identify the practical hurdles to deliver what might sound like a good idea. And we would have to acquire a lot of right-of-way. We would have to engage in land purchases. And to put that into perspective, I can tell you that if you travel Route 2 out by the Goodrich Sugarhouse, that project took 20 years in permitting and acquisition. If you look at downtown Waterbury, one mile, 1.3 miles, 25 years, 103 parcels of property had to be bought in order to simply, you know, scooch utilities a little wider to make that downtown. So the reality is that it would be vastly complex. It isn't even just a money to build the road, but it would be the process in order to start the construction to do that. Now, as Andrea mentioned, strategic disinvestment are things we look at without targeting any particular part of the state. There's prior to the flooding, there was a conversation about a bridge county that's very close to another bridge. I've been part of conversations. I think it's near Chester, where there were three bridges all within about a mile and a half. It makes no sense for us and a local community to invest money like that. But when you tell one landowner, you gotta go another half a mile up the road to get to the bridge to go back to your home. You know, you enlisted a lot of input. Yeah, we hear it too. There are ways to do these things, but if you picture moving an entire road network, that is fairly monumental. So maybe an easier question. I mean, because we heard like there are lots of strategies. Maybe an easier question is, does V-trans track that information in terms of the money that we spend on sections of roads, like over a period of time? If you go back, you know, it would take a little bit of work. If you can go back and track what was spent during Irene, what was spent in the federal highway. Yeah. Damage occurred then, what was spent to replace the roads. You know what we're spending today. One thing I would say, when it comes to resiliency though, if you like Route 131 was one of the stretches here in Andrew's slide, it was an arcing curve that looked like it had been eaten away by a, you know, monster. The sections of 131 that were damaged in July were almost to a section, not sections that were damaged in Irene. Flip that the other way, what we repaired in Irene was stood July. What got broken in July hadn't been improved from Irene because they weren't damaged. So we just don't go in and spend money on that damaged piece I wrote. I'm right along that stretch too. There's a, I think it's called the Whiting Ham or Whitesville Road Intersex 131. There's a bridge right there on 131. I was heavily compromised in Irene, not at all in this flood. And then of course, the Secretary Moore spoke of the Waterbury State Office complex. So a lot of the measures we're taking are working, but every event is different. Well, so anyway. Well, thank you for that. I know it's kind of like a gigantic question, but it's, you know, it was interesting to see that map was de-transcreated after Irene just to see where there were things. And I was, you know, I was curious about like what happened from Irene till now to look at all of that. So I don't want to dominate with questions. I saw some other questions. I saw a representative pouch and then representative Pat. Thank you. This one is, I think for Jeremy, you described prioritizing things on 2,500 year storms. And I assume the storm volume is the same but the probability being 2,550 or 100 years, there's a discussion of them actually changing. And I wonder where you get that data and have they changed and how much have they changed? Yeah. Those measurements. Sure. So, so thanks for the question. In short, no, I don't think the volume is the same. I think both the frequency and the magnitude change is some of those milestone storms. Where we get the data, I think it's a combination of various sources. And I want to shoot from the hip on that, but I think there's recognized ways to be predictive on magnitude of storms in the geographic location. And then that also trickles down into the watershed. So big flat watershed has a different response to a storm than a steep valley watershed. So I think they look at the storm and then they look at the response within that watershed that that structure of receiving to develop that 100 year storm, 50 year storm or 25 year storm. So have those numbers changed at all in the last 15 years? Do you know? I don't know. Okay, thank you. Okay. Where was that, Pat? Yeah. Oh, I thought I saw your hand. An accident. Oh, okay. You can't move with me. Yeah, I'll do you ask my committee. You can't move, I'll call on you. So I'd like to ask. Chair Sheldon. Can one of you, a couple of you talked about working with other agencies. I'd love to hear more specifically how you work with A&R and in particular, efficient wildlife on when you decide to create like a box culvert. How are you accommodating wildlife? When and how are you doing that? So yeah, when we install a structure, we do have a consultation with agency natural resources. And part of that I'm thankful with is to accommodate AOP aquatic organism passage. And so obviously we generally consult with the stream operation engineers who receive input from fisheries biologist and other folks with an agency natural resources. And then we tailor the design about that. Great, so that's on every structure. Yes. Can I just add something about me? A couple of real world examples that we go to route 15 in North Wolcott. We completed a project with Fish and Wildlife. There's a bridge over a camera of the water course that's part of the, I believe the lamoille watershed. And we created a wildlife passage under the bridge. That was a great project with Fish and Wildlife. You may have seen some press recently about two weeks ago, we received 1.6 million grant for planning for a massive project to be built in the future underneath I-89 in Bolton. It'll be a massive opening under the interstate, under the median, intended to not impact surface transportation, but to allow major connectivity in a prime wildlife corridor. And that is all done in coordination with Fish and Wildlife and with DEC. But in particular, the aquatic organisms is in the Fish and Wildlife domain. So we worked with them pretty closely. So I guess it's great to hear about the aquatic organisms. Curious about more terrestrial. That's one great example, but we talk a lot about connectivity in our committee. And so we'd love to know what's the latest, where you're headed with looking at larger terrestrial connectivity. That project that Secretary Clinton speaking of is for terrestrial. Right, I know. Are there more in the pipeline? Well, I would say that all of, just by the ring bank flow with, we are creating, normally a channel is low and low and we create shelves. We also have, we do look at a bridge, we put huge rip rap, we call it large rock that prevents scour. That's the purpose of it. That does not treat hopes very well. So animals cannot cross it. So now we have a standard where we fill that in. So that kind of change that so that there's a substrate to go through there for animals to pass through there. And so while our structures are getting bigger for resilience, they also provide an opportunity for greater passage of different. We also have another project on route nine. I just can't remember the town. It's in, I believe it's better to have the path. It's very quick. So we do, I mean to answer your question. Some culverts organically aren't of the size in the first place. We're in a position where fish and wildlife might tell us that larger animals are prevalent. So we look at the, we look at the hydraulic analysis and not necessarily that other input, but where we're in consultation, they tell us that that's a factor. We take a look at that for sure. It's part of our resource identification on all projects too. Our, our in-house wildlife biologists look at those. Every project that's going to be designed and look for opportunities. And we do a lot of work on modeling. We have done a lot of research to identify where those priority areas are. And so we have right at the beginning of the project really early on, we're putting that into consideration of planning design. We have a discretionary grant under the text. Discretary grant programs also for five, these five crossings on route 12 between Wiser and Elmourn, that will replace grant. So it's to make structures bigger for resilience, for water flow, but there is a protecting species in that area as well. And so we are incorporating measures to help that species get from one side of the road to the other without having to go over it and determining it from going over the road. Great, thank you. Just to follow up on another way to ask the same question, when you say full river width, when you're building out, you place a culvert with something that's full river width, what does that mean? Does it mean that's to the water's edge? So that or what does it mean high water? Or I'm thinking about the same thing that the chair was asking about, which is, is there in these bridges under normal circumstances, are there room for animals to pass on one side or the other? So full length width is loosely defined as you go upstream and downstream and you sort of paint the line figuratively of where the ordinary high water line is, that is the high water line. Yeah, old ordinary high water and that's your, your full bandwidth. It's channel forming flow at the 18 month. Approximately. Are you all set, Reversed Bunkards? Okay. I saw some other hands for their, Reversed McCoy, almost saw you move. So, Reversed Masha. Reversed of Dodger. I was just curious whether within the, the scope of, of this work of resiliency, whether things like bike pad are considered, you know, whether, whether any of those kinds of projects can qualify, you know, not as something that obviously it's looking at big picture of building ways that we reduce, you know, so bigger climate goals. Right. How, how, where do you draw the line for like a bridge that's going to withstand versus building infrastructure that's going to prevent or hopefully help prevent more damage. And how we're talking about resilience or adaptation without talking about the need for mitigation because you can't do one without the other. So they definitely go hand in hand certainly our, like that is part of our mitigation strategies and active transportation, our transit routes, you know, trying to expand our transit, all of that is on our mitigation side, but if we mitigate, we hopefully will be doing our part to combat the need for more adaptation. And then just as a, you know, a new facility going in, you would be looking at resilience for that as well. Great. So I have a follow-up question. What you were, this tool that you've developed, how do you, how are you seeing, I guess where I'm coming from is like, how do we help our towns? Like, and how do we get these tools and resources into our towns? Like some of our larger towns have larger staff that have, that are focused on these issues and some of our smaller towns don't so much. So how do you envision, you know, whether these tools will be, you know, rolled out in the places where we need, where we know there needs to be some planning, resiliency planning. Yeah, we just finished the transportation resilience plan tool towards the end of last state fiscal year to make it statewide. And then right after we finished that, we got money from federal highway to do a training program. And so we just completed in October, I'm looking over there, because I'm Otis Almsmermrow, one of our new staff is focusing on resilience, been leading that transportation resilience planning tool. Training, we just completed, I think it was a dozen trainings on that. So we talked to ANR staff, we talked to our internal staff. We had a couple of sessions with internal staff and then we went out to all the RPC individually and worked with them to invite municipalities that were to join in that. I don't have the numbers of how many people we reached, but it was most of them, small groups of people, but road form and different types of people who were very engaged and very, you know, they're all carrying out a tablet or a phone as they were able to do, to get into the tool point and to look at the, that's where that local knowledge that I talked about with the repeat damages, being able to have their input and continually reaching out to them to understand what they're seeing on the ground. We can model a bunch of different things. We definitely learned a lot from them. We went out and did these trainings to understand that what we're modeling isn't always accurate and that we need to improve our tools continuously to learn more about what has been done and how we can make those more accurate. But yeah, we went out and trained all the RPCs. We just finished that up. And then of course it comes to having funding to be available to do the projects, which is an important piece, a hugely important piece of the puzzle. At least it's in their hands now and they know that they have to replace or if they know if they're doing something to minimize the work that they're doing under the MRGP to construct and place connected standards and they have some tools at their hands that even provide some possible solutions through the transportation and planning tool that does have that mitigation of it to say, if you're doing a product in this area, this is something that you could do. Any last questions? President Campbell. Yes, thank you. I'm wondering about town roads and how much help will provide towns in terms of design and also the financing for making gravel roads more able to stand rains. So ditching and crowning basically. Yeah, I mean, so we do have those updated standards that you've done some resources and we worked with and that was distributed to the town. We also have town and highway grant programs that can fund some of those improvements and upgrades or best practices as well. Is that gotten more rigorous, I guess, since Irene and since... Well, yeah, I mean, as you heard though, the standards are voluntary. There are some financial benefits to it, but I don't believe that there's any mandatory edict at this point. And if I could add in addition to the grants Jeremy mentioned, there's the Better Roads program. Maybe we fund that at Neatrans. We're connected with every... I would be surprised that there's a road for a person in Vermont who doesn't know somebody from their district garage. I really would. I might be a member of the select board who doesn't know the direct... That's not a knock on the select board people, but the people that are doing the work every day, they know who their V-Trans reps are and we work with every one of them. We will, including helping to review plans or provide input on local projects that they're going to undertake. So your question about the funding, we only have a menu suite of grants available, which as you know from the past state budgets at least has been robust. I think the 24 budget rolled up was $97 million from the agency to Vermont communities. We know there are several ways, but I mean, it's at the end of the day too, the funding ultimately lies with the municipal community if it's doing some major work. Do we know... So we know all the state roads that get damaged repeatedly. Do you know the town or is it awesome? I would have to circle back. I know working with BEM, I think we have a parking handle. Here's what I can tell you. When there's a weather event, V-Trans is the one out there doing the preliminary damage assessments on town roads. So that we do know because we do those damage assessments, we roll that number up to Vermont emergency management who then looks at the calculations based on the damages necessary for accounting and then the statewide damage and then that determines whether or not we believe we're eligible for a declaration and then the governor makes that decision. So we know very closely what those damages are from an event that's just occurred. And then following that as the case of July's, we also had a lot of rain on August 3rd. We talk about July, but that just sort of rolls into August 3rd, which Wallop Addison got and then December. And so, as you probably heard, a lot during press conferences, if towns tell us, if towns through their emergency management director tell the state emergency operation center that they need help in something, we were there. I mean, I personally was aware of assistance. We let in bridge water on Saturday and there are no days of the week when you're in the middle of a mask, right? So I don't say that as one of us, but I think having been a member of a select board, I think the agency does a lot to support towns. It's never enough. I know a town needs to consider moving a road or when you saw some of the pictures from July and some of the washouts on local towns, I remember seeing a dramatic picture from Randolph or Bethel. It was a person standing in what was scoured out and it's still towered over this person. It was 12 or so feet deep. I mean, that's a major problem. Yeah. All right, thank you. Thank you. I think it's 4.30 and I wanna wrap us up. And I just wanna thank everyone from V-Trans for joining us today. And thank Mike Ferrant and our committee assistants, Will and Jeannie for making this all, the technology I'll work for this joint meeting. We're gonna come back on Friday to continue this focus with the people being at it's a municipal level, how we'll be hearing from regional planning commissions from around the state that were impacted by the flooding and some other folks too. So we'll be doing that after the floor on Friday. But thanks everybody. And I think with that, we'll end our live stream.