 So I want to welcome everybody to this conversation. Thank you for showing up on an evening that's beautiful. We haven't had so many of those. So that certainly shows your dedication to this. My name is Christine Carlson. I'm going to help facilitate this conversation as we talk about emergency planning and thinking about what our community can do. We're going to break the conversation up into three topic areas, as you've probably seen on the agenda. We're going to first hit sort of what's going on now, what are some actionable items. And then based on all the conversation, can everyone hear me OK? I know there's a fan back there. OK. Based on the conversation as a team, we're going to select probably our top few topics that we want to bring for me to report out that, again, will lead to action. So I think I live in Montpelier just so everyone knows that I have a 12-year-old child who attends the 7th grade. I grew up in central Vermont my whole life. I was here for the 92 flood as a student at U32, do the math. And then I'm now here witnessing what's happened to the community that I love so much. And I know that there may be emotions when people talk about some of the destruction. And that's a welcoming space for any feelings that people have about this. But we are a smaller group. But I think this is one of the most important topics. It's what I'm very passionate about, because it, OK, now we're going to roast. But I miss the fan now. But it is a really important topic. So I think the first thing that would be helpful. Oh, and I want to also introduce Maddie Mori-Claussen. Hello. I'll be describing to this video and taking down your notes. So thanks for having me. I grew up in Montpelier and live in Brenton, but I'm often here. So I'm happy to be here. And her sister babysat my kid. So as we all know, Montpelier is a strong community. And that's shown in all the work that folks have shown up. I'm also on the steering committee with Dan working on this effort. So one of the first things I think that's important to do is to ground the conversation in what is going on now. So before we move to what we want to see happen, maybe what didn't work well, I think it would be great to start the conversation around what is happening now with this topic in terms of emergency. What's happening now? Yeah. So for example, that would be to frame up, I during the storm have signed up for emergency tax from the state. So as an example, something that's happening now that's a resource is when I was in Colchester and I had to drive home and the interstate was getting set to close, I saw that the interstate was getting set to close, and I hightailed it from Colchester to make it home. So that's an example, maybe not as relevant. Oh, yeah, you were talking about what I thought meant today. Yeah, not like this very second. Something now is that the air has turned off, and we're hot. But no, it's a broader conversation about what's happening. So that's one example, probably not the main example. And while you're starting to think about that, and before we move to the next, which I think is where probably folks are the most excited to talk about are the action diagrams. I do want to introduce Emily Harris. She is, well, you can introduce yourself. Yeah. I don't need to. So I'm Emily Harris. I live up on Berlin Street, but I also work for Vermont Emergency Management. I'm the engagement section chief there, and so my section works with our local officials, our local emergency management directors. I thought you're still the entity here, right? Yeah. So every town has an emergency management director that coordinates emergency management in town. And so my section works with Bob. We provide training. We provide exercises where we practice, how we're going to respond to emergencies, and we also do school safety just because that's me. So again, Emily is here as a resource. So folks might have questions about what's currently happening, not here to lead the conversation or dominate but to add. But I think it might be interesting if you want to introduce yourself as well. Thank you for being there. Hi, I'm Robert Gowns. I'm the fire chief and the emergency management director for the city. And I also manage the health department. And I guess I'm here more just to listen and hear what people have to say. I was the incident commander in the emergency operations center the night of the flight. Thank you. So I'd like to open it up to the floor. We're an intimate group. I think if everyone wants to sit together, they can. You can say against them all too if it's more comfortable. But does anyone want to start the conversation? What's happening now around this subject? OK, I'll start. Two weeks ago, I had dinner with my friend Roger Hill. You may know him as the weather guy on DEV. He actually, his main business is forecasting weather events so it's such a way that the utilities can pre-position their equipment for repairs. So he was telling me, see, five days before this event in July, it was evident that a major storm was brewing. Two days before, it was evident that this was about to be a catastrophic storm. OK, he was kind of surprised that there was no major mobilization, as was I, of resources, material, et cetera, that happened in the case of this. So there was a level of failure on both the city and the state administration in this because we just all saw the pictures from California where they had a few days warning people were filling sandbags, the police were getting people in the home. There was actually some mobilization of effort. We didn't have that here. OK, so we lost hundreds of cars downtown that got flooded that didn't have to be. We had people being forced to move upstairs without knowing stuff, whereas if they had been warned that this was a probability early in the day on Monday, there could have been a lot of movement of stuff upstairs. There could have been a lot of repositioning of stuff so that the catastrophic destruction for a lot of our stores and a lot of our people could have been avoided. Like I said, the cars could have gone to national life. They could have gone up on the hill. But there were no police, not the endures. There were no notice. There was a notice on the phone, so if we all have the emergency response. But it didn't actually tell you anything to do. It was sort of like in Hawaii. They couldn't even get the management thing to work. So we were stuck in a situation where there was nobody doing that. Then finally, the swift boats come in on Tuesday. Later in the night, they try and get people over to the traffic circle because, well, we're going to open the junior high, the middle school, because the roads are closed very. So somehow, the idea of having an emergency response center in Montpelier was available in terms of the kind of imagining that the city did. This meant that we were now in a situation where people were just sort of left off. There was no food, no water, no place to sit, et cetera, at the middle school. So this was compounding a situation in which we didn't see anything from the state in terms of the National Guard showing up. We didn't see anything in mobilization of resources rapidly. It was sort of an empty shell for all of us for quite a while. And it wasn't until the volunteers showed up at the hub a day later to try and help mobilize the cleanup crew that we start seeing something happening and that was purely from the volunteer standpoint. So I was very disappointed personally in the city's response and the state's response to this. And it cried out to me that there needs to be some larger body that can oversee this kind of emergency response and rather than waiting for the kind of administrative incompetence that we experience, that we can have a way of looking at this as a community, as a larger community, and say, what are we going to do in the future so that we know who's responsible for what? What are they doing? What is the list of who's going to be doing what where? Who's going to be mobilized when? How do we pre-position stuff? All of this stuff, why isn't there an emergency shelter, if you will? So, Dan, I just want to pause because I want to make sure everyone has a chance. OK, I'm sorry. I'm fine. That was a great tee-up, right? I think we all, I saw a lot of nodding. I think what you're saying is familiar to folks who lived in town. I want to make sure because I think you did a great tee-up. I will drop it now. No, but you did a great tee-up. And I want to pause in case other folks want to talk about sort of what's happening now. But maybe people are ready to move in. So I think you nicely transitioned to the gaps. And so I think the main goal of today is to think tonight is to think about like, I think we felt the gaps as residents. And so I think it's how do we come up with ideas? And you were pivoting to the ideas solution pretty well there, but just want to pause in case other people want to comment anything about the now. And if we're done with the now, we can just jump right into like what we should be doing. And I'm looking to you all. So yeah. I haven't read over any things that have come in yet of the ideas. So I was just listing out mine. And I'd be really interested to hear a recap, like you said, of people that know like, since the flood, what's happening in this room? What's on the table going to be done? Yeah, I don't know if it's possible to just recap some of that. Like, what's in the works right now? So I think the main goal of today. So there's different areas. Besides this, I mean. Oh, besides this, I haven't read it. Chris, can I just say something about that? Do you want to? I don't have an answer. But I think given some of the expertise we have in the room, I think it's worth repression what we have in place as a municipality. And some plan work that's taken place over the last 10 years that we may have been able to build upon to address some of the gaps you very accurately pointed out. So I'll probably in the best position, I'll take it like a local emergency management plan. Yeah, so the city has a very robust, a couple of very robust emergency management plans. They are available on the city's website. And a lot of it is around flooding. Some of the things you can find on the city's website are the local hazard mitigation plan, which was updated in 2023, which is updated, approved by the state. We worked with Central Monterey Regional Planning Commission to adopt that plan. We have a local emergency management plan that we update annually. And that gets approved by both Central Monterey Regional Planning and the state. You can also find the river hazard regulations, the flood plan regulations, the flood insurance rate zone maps, and there's maps on the city's website for the special flood hazard areas in the river corridor area. So all of that information is available. It is available for people to look at. And those are robust plans. The city's hazard mitigation plan is a 115 page plan. It goes into great details on all of these topics. Thank you. There are a number of plans in place. In addition to that, I can continue if you like. It depends. Is this helpful for folks? Yep. Yes. Well, if you're respectful, Dan. So continue. Was that helpful or do you want to hear more? Oh, I don't know. I'm just wondering what happened to them because it feels like things are part of it. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll be more. Yeah. So for people that don't use the internet very much, would there be a helpful thing to have a booklet on this? So one thing I think that would be great is so the goal of tonight, you know, and we have the city here as a resource, then I think we all have emotions around what happened or not. The goal of tonight is as a community to come together and come up with solutions. So one area we can identify as a gap and Maddie's taking notes and I think it's one of the ones that we should hit is how was, and I heard it from Dan and I heard it from you and I heard also some other folks nodding, how was that information communicated to folks? So I think that's something that's actionable, right? So that's kind of the idea of where we want to land at the end of this. Right. So that's a great, I think that's. So I suggest a book for Dan. A book, yeah. Yeah. Specific to Montpelier. So yeah, so for the next, let's sort of, I think we're already there. That would be, a book's a great idea works. Where you can go to one, it is available through the planning office, but you have to look for it and it's in different areas. So, you know, having that all along is a great idea. That is a great idea. So yeah, so now let's pivot to what are your ideas? What could or should have been done for recovery and resilience? We all live through it. We obviously have ideas of what could have been better. We're gonna come up with a whole list of them and at the end is group decide what are some three areas that we wanna have action items and what we can focus on to do. So I think we already have one of our first ones, but I wanna make sure everyone came here tonight because they have a view on something they wanna share. So I wanna make sure we pause and someone else goes now. I think having us available to help one another without a good warning could have helped a lot. I went downtown on Monday morning after we, Monday afternoon after we got the text saying, hey, this is gonna be serious, which came out over the emergency alert system. I think around noon or 11. 11. And, you know, we were planning a grocery run. We called down to some shopkeepers in Montpelier and said, can we help you get stuff to higher ground? And we're told, well, I think we're mostly done with it. Well, they weren't. People were apparently given an idea of a flood level to expect and the water came up higher. And they were probably taxed and overwhelmed. If we had a volunteer group organized ahead of time to get the book sale out of the library basement, inventory out of storefronts, there could have been a much easier cleanup. And I would have been a heck of a lot happier lifting clean, not sodden materials with the gold I had that month. So we could have done that. And we could have had a plan. My neighborhood up off of Territory was totally marooned. We had a couple who were coming back from a medical appointment in Boston on their way to Burlington, who ended up spending a night in a house where someone took them in. They couldn't get out even through middle sex. We had a lot of older residents. What would have happened if someone had been seriously injured or had a health emergency? It would be nice to know that and have a plan so you would know what to do for your neighbor if that came to pass. So I heard a couple of things there. I just want to repeat that stood out. One idea was some sort of pre-organization of a volunteer group that could be mobilized. I know volunteers were mobilized after it hit, but something before, like you said, moved the clean material. And then want to dig in a little bit about your idea about adequate warning. So let's talk a little bit about what does that look like? What does adequate warning, so I always say I know adequate warning means telling us before the storm hits, but let's talk specifically. So for folks get their information in lots of different ways. So let's brainstorm what we could propose for adequate warning. And one thing that strikes me as I think that one is every time there's a major thunderstorm, we're warned about flash floods. And flash floods. We get used to seeing this. This wasn't flash floods, this was a different beast. And knowing that that was in the offing for a little bit of a difference. So let's talk a little bit about specifically ideas, sirens, text alerts, phone calls, door to door. What would be sort of helpful here? I think that, I don't know what happened with the capital area neighborhood and I wasn't involved with it. So I don't know about that. But do we have a siren or a horn or something here? We do not. I would suggest that too. Okay, that's it. So siren? We've had a bunch of, of some planning sessions who was in that exact suggestion has come up that a siren for, you know, we could also have a drought year and with so much undergrowth, we could have fires. So we need an emergency warning system that is very visible to people to know that we're safe. I would also like to put out that I'd rather be safe than sorry. This goes along to your thing about, well, we get these flash flood warnings. So, you know, because it's hard when you're saying, okay, well, you've got to move your stuff up. You've got to move out of here, et cetera. Because that's, you know, like, oh my God, that's just more work. And with this, you know, we've got to start taking this seriously because climate change is real. Okay, the climate crisis is real. This is going to keep happening because as long as there's hot weather in the West, it's going to be loading a lot of moisture into the atmosphere coming and, oh, look, these nice mountains here in the Adirondacks and the Greens. Let's dump it here. So we're going to have this, you know, this has been one of the worst summers any of us can remember just with the, not even with the thing. So we've got to start saying, okay, I would rather have to move my car and move some stuff. Prior to this, even if I have to, you know, it gets me discombobulated for a day, rather than having to go through what I went through with friends of digging out the basements or getting the stuff. I mean, this is awful. You know, it's like, you know, watching, looking all these cars on Elm Street and other things that are just drowned and not going to go anywhere. I mean, it was a failure. So just to go back to what you're saying, my understanding is that we have a 42% population who are in the elderly. Yes, we do. And so that's high. And so I think we really need to think about something big for them as well. And also for me, the first thing that came to my mind were the homeless population and where were they? How were they hearing about this if they were? I'd be interested in knowing how the business, I think it was Splash, where I heard that she was able to move all of her stuff out of the shop. So I don't know where she heard that this was happening so that she could prepare for it and why were not other shopkeepers aware or didn't hear of that or didn't do it or and it's not to put blame, it's just to understand how some can do it and some can't or don't. So, and I hope that's the correct business because I think it would be interesting. I think she's here tonight. She is? Yeah, she is here. Yeah, she's here. I'm sure she'd be willing to share that. Yeah, I think it'd be good to know how she heard about it and when did she hear about it? How much time did she need to do what she did? I would also love to pick up on the theme that you mentioned about the elderly. And we think about notification, we've talked about like a siren or some kind of warning as an idea that reaches some folks, right? But do you have any ideas on what might be effective for reaching the elderly or just do other folks? But I think that's a really important and then we can talk about the unhoused which I think is another critical piece of the conversation. I don't wanna do, I'm sorry, I just haven't, yes, sorry, yeah, I hope it is. So I have a long history in emergency management and I was a Red Cross disaster volunteer for almost 20 years, so I have a lot of, just insight and it was really different being on the outside, watching things happen this time. I wasn't part of the response, I was part of the affected. So I have a couple of thoughts and also my work is as an advocate for people with disabilities. So I have a lot of concerns around the population. So I assume, well, I'll stay focused. One of my thoughts about how to notify people and how to get the word out. I know Montclair Alive did like an amazing job having volunteers after the fact and being there and really helping the community. And I'm trying to think like maybe beforehand maybe we're utilizing volunteers to go door to door. Tease off of your idea. Yeah, to go door to door. Because sometimes people aren't, especially if you're concerned about the elderly population or even people with disabilities, they're not necessarily as up on the social media stuff or alerts or I couldn't get my mother to use a cell phone. So I mean, there's just those battles. So I think we may be having some kind of door to door. But that is something that needs to have some training and planning and not just something you just do in the spur of the moment. And then I'm also thinking about individuals with disabilities. And I know like, is it the Gary home? Is that the residential care or is this the living? I'm sure, I believe those homes are supposed to have their own like disaster plans, emergency plans. And again, it just comes back to the warnings of like how, how much do we know? When do we know it? And I might be mis-speaking, but I first heard about the storm on Sunday. But then when I was listening to, I think the governor's press conference on Monday, he referenced, oh, we knew this was coming Friday. And I'm like, what? Like I didn't hear that. So, you know, there's just kind of this, I don't know what was going on with the communication who we know, you know, like uneven communication. Yeah, like when we knew it was gonna be really bad time. So those are just a few. It was clear on Friday that it was coming. Yeah. So you have a lot of expertise, so we're very lucky to have you in the room. And I think it teased off of your idea, which is some sort of volunteer group that is pre-ready to go and has specialized training. Do you think that would be a good way to reach, like, I guess, elderly or folks who might have other abilities? Well, and there's other disability agencies too, like by age, you know, I work for disability rights Vermont, you know, and then you have Vermont Center for Independent Living which is right in my field here who is devastated by the flood. But just maybe utilizing those organizations who work for populations that may be more vulnerable and you wanna try to get the word out, we might have ways to try to help with that as well. The other theme I heard was trying to focus on reaching the unhoused population. And so we'd love to talk about that. And I know you had us on. I just wanna mention our outreach workers who are helping the homeless population. Every time there's been a warning of a flood, they're on it as much as it can be. So one person I know like she works through the group at the Welcome Center with her families. But she's an outreach person for this area. And she's definitely tries to get the word to anyone who can go and warn people who are camping at the river or things like that. So I just wanna mention that they're doing what they can although I think that is a situation where they need to know how to reach workers because of our general increase and people not having housing. So probably more of like a door to door. Sorry, yes, I'm good. I'm sorry, no. Yeah, continue. I can't remember the name of it from the whole point. Mary. Mary from Homeland Systems Worker. You had mentioned the can. Oh, and I'm really, I don't know much about this panel. I can speak to that if you'd like. I don't know what happened to it but I think that would be wonderful as in what you're thinking like. Can you just explain to folks? Neighborhood groups, so there was a group, each neighborhood had, maybe you can explain that. Yeah, I actually have some experience with this. Okay. So the. Just so I wanna make sure everyone's familiar with it. Yeah, it's Capital Area Neighborhoods. It was a setup in 09 in response to the great financial breakdown where people were worried about seniors not having food or energy during the winter and that would. And so some neighborhoods responded more than others. One of the problems was always maintaining a organizing leadership within that area because there was no actual coordination of it. There wasn't any kind of official system. It was more like put together. There was a grant that helped put it together and then the grant went away. We tried to get it going again three years ago with Under Sustainable Montpelier. The same problem was that there was no real budget or leadership and that's one of the problems that is required is there has to be somebody, some people in the neighborhood. And that's what you were saying like we would want this to be so pivoting again to like this, like if we were to propose something like that I'm hearing it would need some kind of sustainable funding. Some kind of professional leadership. Professional support. And professional training because if you're sending someone to someone's home or you're sending someone to someone's home by the river you need to know how to approach people. That is. And we have the potential of other, and this is where it's something I think we have to consider when this, there are other kinds of emergencies we've seen in Oregon and Washington all of a sudden these cool areas that add eat domes brutal for the senior population. Same with fires, et cetera. So we have to have a broader definition of what can be an emergency and what emergencies we have to respond to. And therefore it's identifying people within the neighborhood or willing to take on leadership support them, train them and then have them doing the outreach within the community to get a core volunteer. So the idea is there's 25 neighborhoods, 26 neighborhoods, sort of that you can define within Monterey or each of those needs, you know, a person who's going to do that. And so we looked at this a while ago but the idea that there needs to be actually a couple of facilitators, you know, people are actually putting things together doing the copying, doing the training, et cetera. It's not something that just happens because people would like it to show up. Yeah. And I think, you know, if we do have these neighborhoods and we said 26, it would be good to know where people can go. And if they are divided by, if there are 26, can we identify maybe, I don't know, four or six of these places where people can go? Because you don't want everyone going to the same place, right? Because eventually that's gonna fill out. It was more on the idea of being able to have people check in on their neighbors. Are you okay? Do you need anything? Rather than having facilities within the, it was more like, oh, you know, you got no heat come over here. You know, oh, you've got no, you know, oh, you're cut off. Like talking about that, what happened up on Territory, et cetera. What was the budget for you're talking about? What was a need of a budget for that group? What was that, I mean? It was somewhere around 50 or 60,000 for. But what was it? What was it? The budget. That was back on Oh My. But I guess the question is, what was the money used for? What did it use for? Like as we think about this as a sustainable thing, right? Because it sounds like this had successes and then wasn't sustainable. It's sort of a lot of interest in that block. That's a great question. Like what was the actual funding? Like did that go to fund a position? Did that fund training? What did the money to go for resources for food? Mostly went for resources and food, from what I understand. It was done by Glenn Hall Smith in the planning department at the time. And so it was one of those things that required sort of leadership energy and once that was removed, went. Can I speak to that? Yeah. Just because I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm covering this for the bridge, but I actually was a neighborhood coordinator through Cannes. And at the time, that was recently right before it ended. And I think that the money was going to pay a coordinator. Right. And it couldn't have happened without that coordinator. She got everybody together for big meetings. She helped like. So there needs to be a budget for probably, I would say two coordinators, but. Yeah, I think so. It was really hard to be a volunteer without that and the program fell apart when I think it was a grant, like we said. It was a grant, but I wasn't here at the time. I was just, it was reported to me and I got together. And then we've tried to revive it without the coordinator position three years ago. And, you know, we have a list of who the leaders were that happened and left out. I would love to hear from other people on that idea, because it sounds like, you know, we could do it in lots of different ways. It could be broken up by neighborhood. So it's very hyper local, you know, any other thoughts people have as they're hearing about this now. So I'm living on Loomis Street right now. And there's about 14 tenants in this little complex where I live. And so all of us checked in with all of, everyone that was there checked in with each other. And we checked in with the elder that lived in alone in the front. Everyone made sure that everyone was okay. My neighbor, I asked her if I could sleep on her porch upstairs, because I'm on the ground floor. And just in case we got that influx from the dam, you just never know. I don't want to wake up from my arm out and have water there. So I slept up on her porch and we were all checking in on each other. And so that was, you know, like you said. Kind of an example of that working. Yeah, like you said, there could be different degree, different, it doesn't always have to be, you know, maybe there could be different setups of it. That's where I thought I heard it, yeah. Yeah, one thing that I might just throw out there is that I, so I'm part of the parks and trees department here. And I'm one of the staff there. And I've been at the hub since the flood, because we took over the staff theme and have helped out with Mom Peeler's life there. We mobilized our whole department to switch and we haven't done parks up in forever. And that is an opportunity as well to kind of connect to existing members of the city government and mobilize them in a different way. We did it, we switched to mobilizing volunteers and that worked out. And I think if we had a known ahead of time that we could mobilize to connect with potentially canned coordinators or get messaging, you know, get the leaflets out, something like that, we could definitely do it as a city. So if a department is connected to those emergency plans and known that they need to switch gears and in a situation to be called out, I think we could do it. Well, I think we learned a lot from the hub. As city staff, we learned a lot from the hub of what can happen. So that's a great idea. So another one to build on is sort of repositioning. Maybe your first priority is no longer relevant right now, right, so then you repositioned. I want to keep on this theme of notification and see what other ideas folks have. Because again, I think we've found. Yeah, no, I said a comment on notification. You know, I have kids in the school system and they're not really a rock tree system. It's just no storm, we all get a home call. Looking at the flooding event, I think we could have something like a city map with zone A, B, C, and you get a call. If you're in zone A and you're in car to hide or ground, oh, they eat your furniture or the possible, if you're in zone C, B, et cetera. Of course, that's just dealing with the event we just came through. Dan called out the fire hazard and the idea of an all hazard to learn and how we respond and hear with an alarm and a personalized call from our fire department saying, hey, this is the situation, this is the plan. It's not gonna get to everyone, we'll get to the both of us, so far. But it's gonna hopefully get to enough that we watch out for our neighbors and they'll be able to spread that word. And the police? Yeah, it could be used. Yeah, and I'm sure for example in our hazard mitigation plan, there's language about cooling stations and how do we get that news out to the elderly in another kind of event that could be deadlocked? That's the most deadly kind of natural disaster we have in the country, so. And during this event, our cooling centers, as far as I know, are sitting all in the library. And both buildings have been closed, so yeah. But they don't know if they broke that. Yeah, it's a really good point, because the one thing we know for sure is that we're trying to change these dorms and events are gonna increase if you can see the severity. So this isn't the ones in 100 year event, unfortunately. In fact, our entire library is, our library is mostly not air-conditioned. If you go in there on a hot day and the members got to work on this workshop, they have an air-conditioned conference room in there. Should you always try to meet them? I hope that this is a good place to meet them. I think her notification, another thing to think about is, again, systems that are already in place. And I know one of the things that I helped with after the fact, via the hub, was doing some meals on wheels deliveries. So if you're thinking of that system, it had a time as a way to get information to vulnerable people about events that might be coming up. And throwing in also, too, when you're thinking about giving information out or if it's gonna be any kind of written form of information that it's gonna be accessible to everybody. You know, something about translation services, thinking about disabilities, and yeah. But the meals on wheels would be another good avenue of linking with volunteers who already go to the library area. Yeah, that's an excellent idea because they're known to people and know their needs, usually. They kept them to them and said, hey, how are you doing when they deliver? That's really a good idea. I think one of the other things that I don't remember when the shelter at the school was set up, do you remember, at the middle school, that became like a temporary until they could be sent up to vary. Yeah, I don't remember exact time it was. On Monday, was it on Monday? Monday morning, probably on Monday morning. So as folks were getting evacuated out of the meadow. But we make a note of an emergency facility here in town rather than the idea of going to bury. It seems like just the issues that have been brought up about various places, you couldn't get to bury for a long time, so we need something that's more set up here in town rather than saying, well, the Red Cross is over there, well, why don't you go over there? Yeah, 302 was sort of a problem. Unfortunately, those probably would have been the churches or the high school. Well, that's where the middle school could set up a place with cats, some food and water just so if you had people showing up there at least. And who has good boats that do rescue people besides people just coming in from out of state and the crews, like how many boats are available through the emergency system and another flood to get some elderly people out and take them to a place. Like, I'm just curious. You know exactly how many flood water teams we have. So I do know that that number would be statewide. Yeah, right. That would be needed to hear and those boats were deployed statewide. Did I? Sorry, so we were talking about the urban search and rescue teams, which we've got a bunch in the state but the problem is that they're statewide and so they're deployed all around the state when something happens. So they're down south and they're down in Brooklyn. And we have floods all over the state. It'd be wonderful, I think, to have some boats in these communities that we are next to the river. I was in Irene and I got my canoes ready and it was really helpful. We rescued two people. Right, it really feels like we're on a fleet or something. Yeah. We should have our own fleet or something. Yeah, we're at the river. We need a couple boats to have some elderly people get out or get to or disabled or whoever that can't make it on their own. They can't charge the car because they got flooded. Did we, do you know, I know the state brought in dozens and dozens of these experts. Did any have to come to Montpelier? Do you have any insight on what we did? I mean, we brought tons of people from out of state. I'm just wondering if any had a pillar and if any of them you said. Yes, we had a swift water rescue team in Montpelier. We had two actually in Montpelier. And they performed some rescues in Montpelier but they were staged here in Montpelier and one of them was staged here prior to flooding. Oh, wow. So there is already some capacity. Yeah, the state has, you know. Oh, I see. They have that planned. Okay, great. We had a swift water rescue team in Montpelier Sunday. I saw one here and I wasn't indicating it wasn't around. I just didn't know like when you have a flood, how long does it take to get them and is there one like locally? There are teams located all around the state and we try and like jigsaw where they're gonna go based on where we think the impacts are gonna be and where they can get to at various times during the disaster. So as people may know, like flooding started down south and so it was getting the teams down there and moving them north ahead of the storm as we could release them from down south. We also brought in helicopters too for the places that the teams couldn't actually get into even with their boats. Did they feel like, I'm just curious, did you feel like you had enough? I mean, that's why we brought in folks from out of state. So, I get what I am hearing from a couple folks in interest in resourcing emergency planning and response and I think this is a good one to add to the list because this has come up now, boats, what is our own resiliency look like as a community? And you know, this isn't the time to shoot it down because maybe there are reasons why that doesn't make sense but it certainly is something to think about. And I think so. The other thing that I was, I think one of the biggest messages we can give in the important message is notification. I think, you know, I was thinking the other than just the unhoused population, I was also thinking what would have happened if the kids were in school and we weren't notified until Monday and they were in school. If I had a child in school and I'm sure I'm not the only parent, I would be heading to school and you don't want people going into town because that's where the flood is heading. So I think, you know, waiting until the last minute to notify people is really, it's not helpful. So definitely hearing from everybody more notification early, but with love, like we have several specific ideas around the notification. So I think we've identified that as a gap, but like what does that, you know, we talked about and we get a lot of notifications for the rebond steal and those are pretty responsive. That's a text alert. That's not going to capture the unhoused. We talked about having maybe a trained group of volunteers with a paid leader who is trained. We talked about pivoting some of the city leadership and to going to do this work in a way that's very trained and actionable. Like we've gotten more specifics. We talked about also the map and how is that like, but again, there is no one way to notify. So part of the brainstorming is all our different lived experiences we bring. So like I would love to hear what else, what else should we be doing as a community for? And we talked about the siren, for example, that was something. Yeah, how about the band that goes across the TV when, you know, you're expecting there's some kind of alert so people who don't have a cell phone might be watching TV. And so that would be another. So I just, I'd be negligent if I didn't mention this, it sounds like people might be aware about Vermont Alert. So Vermont Alert is where you can sign up for whatever alerts you want, you can get a text, you can get a phone call on their landline on your cell phone, you can get an email, however you want to receive it. And then those alerts can come from your city. And I think the city actually issued about 18 alerts during this event out of residence, letting them know what was going on. When you're speaking to a particular the banner across the TV, that's called the emergency alert system. And that has to be, that can be issued in an immediate life safety issue where right now something is happening or about to happen. It can't be like a day in advance. It's a federal requirement that we can't do it that far with dance. But it is certainly an option that we can issue emergency alert system messages about how to communicate with kids. Immediate life safety, like the dam is about to break. That is an emergency alert system message. And if people aren't signed up for Vermont Alerts, I have the information here. So you can, because Emily, we put out, we started putting out VP Alert messages on Sunday. Yeah, that was, those alerts say, I work in full tester, that alert saved me from being one of the folks stuck on the interstate because. Yeah. So we were at messaging as early as Sunday. Yeah, I think that was very helpful. But again. Even with radio, we don't have TV. We don't have TV, but spend Sunday listening to a socks game on TV. They're very community minded. But there was no mention of the governor having to clear the state of emergency. And, you know, if we've known, we might have done anything differently. We might have offered help to other people. So radio, especially local radio, like TV. And at the point, we've, like, put a few local radio resources. So maybe try to. And so it has many ways. Oh, you're getting hot air. Yeah. Do you want to sit over here? It's not as bad over here. You certainly don't need any more heat. No. We'll just have an air purifier, and I'll just turn it off. So have people have. Sorry, but I'm not sure we did. And with Vermont Alert, I found out about it after a friend from Addison County was coming to visit me and told me I was under a boil of water notice when I went near ride. I've been living in town for years and went in and asked John Odom how I would find out about boil water notice. And he said, oh, well, this is what you do. Could those just, that flyer could be slipped into the water bill once or twice a year so that everybody's reminded it's there? Also with the water system, I was amazed how many people in this event were worked up on Frontport Forum about how to deal with a boil water notice. In reality, you ought to have water in your house. You should have clean water on hand. FEMA puts that out on all of their guidelines. That information should be disseminated widely in print. Well, see, there's a whole other session on infrastructure going on, because we have a failing water system. I can't tell you. I know. It is a semi-routine event. And people in this town should know boiling water requires this, that, and the other. And you probably ought to have some bottled water, because if that water had been contaminated, it wouldn't just have been back turned to fire. And I do know that with those notices, that Green Mountains Support Services actually developed a flyer, an accessible flyer, around the instructions on what it means when there's a boil water notice impact to it. That's just another example of a resource for. I'm going to go back to the can thing for a second. Yeah, I just want to pause one second. That's something we can do. And we've done a couple of, we've set up, I think, three times at town meeting voting. We've had a table set up in the voting, handing this information out, but sending it out through Waterville is something that's a great idea. I'll take that back. And especially we can do it in a way that partners with an entity knows that it's accessible. But I want to make sure we have more thoughts, King Hong, but I want to capture that one because that's, again, an actionable way to reach everybody. And with the discussion about having the city's disaster management plan in public form, that would be a way to do a neighbor-to-neighbor connection. To set up that volunteer group. Because a lot of us don't know our neighbors. I love the story of the apartment building where everybody looked after everybody. I've lived in places like that. My neighborhood right now is not like that. And if we had more excuses to get together and say, okay, we five houses, we look after one another, we inform one another and try to keep. And share contact information. I have contact information from my neighbors, right? Yeah. And there's also this wonderful 2000 main volunteer list that they have, which seems to be, you know, could be a resource for helping identify people who would like to be part of a, you know, more connecting. You know, that's why I think there's all sorts of areas where we want to help connect people, which goes to your issue about knowing your people and your neighborhood. This is a huge part of community safety. And because we all, you know, we had some, you know, the problem with the emergency alert thing is do you get it so often, you say, oh, I want to know that again. And so how do we ramp up the understanding, which is usually a person-to-person contact, that you got to do something here, you know, because these alerts don't actually give you that kind of feedback after you've had so many of them, okay, just another alert. Mm-hmm. I think you had, I just want to make sure that you had a thought a few minutes ago. Well, I guess what I was going to say when I was just first thinking about this, you know, you get television, internet, phone. If you don't have any of those three, then you got your neighbors, your friends, who can come to your house and talk to you. So I really believe in that. And that's what you need. If, you know, if we get things knocked out, that's what you need. You need to just- Absolutely. Yeah, that speaks to that I have a network and sometimes it's not going to be like, oh, planned out and all this training, you're just going to go next door and knock on the door. Or some of them, no training at all, can put a fly under every door within like two hours. Yeah. I've got a lot of work. Yeah. Also, how did it go? No, no, you're- I was just wondering, how many neighborhood can and coordinators? What, they're like captains for the- They were at, at best, they were about 12 or 13 when was doing it. They were actually really active. But there was a- So remember this, there were like signs, I think someone in my house, in my neighborhood, in front of their house, that's what they were on. It was like, I didn't know what that was. Well, you know, and I'm- That's not how I'm- It's just to have like a, I don't know, the fact of a captain who texts everyone. There's a text there that people I don't even know, but I know they live a lot. And that's how I find that I lost my stuff because I'm like strangely not connected in certain ways. And, you know, if that person would be approached to be a captain, I'm sure she would do it. And then, you know, just having like it be common practice is saying, alert three of your friends and family. Alert three. Three others. And that's just like, it becomes a slogan. Alert three people, you know. And then, you know, work about spreads and it feels like an actionable thing someone can do. So when they're given that task, it feels like a task they can do and they'll probably do it. Thank you, that's a good idea. Because then it speaks to the idea of like making it hyper-local. So that you can actually like, have an action item. But also, whoever you are, then you can also tell your neighbor who might live, I mean, your non-neighbor, your friends who might live entire street. Somewhere else or in barrier or whatever. But then, you know, we all have that one friend, probably Dan, who's like super, super connected and he's always telling us, do this, do that. Dan, our action item is to detect the whole city. Yes, I know, I know. Everyone give Dan your cell phone. Right, but like to empower those people who are really doing that. And have the other layers of reaching people is key, you don't have cell phone access. You might have need information in a different way. I think it has to be front and center. Yeah, and I'm just building off of all of this was I think that in the thick of it, when you're trying to get things ready and materials ready, it would be nice to have those ready and available ahead of time. So in terms of communications, that we can just send the city can put it out, hand this fire out to this street. I think the specificity could also be really key. The more general those alerts are, the more people get them, the less they take them seriously. But if we had sent a specific team to Elm Street and said you guys need to get out of Elm Street, that would they would have taken that much more seriously than a city wide alert. So I think the specificity piece can be really interesting, especially to have maybe like designated zones of like you were mentioning, but designate the hand acts to go with that of severity level. You're right, like to geo target. Yeah. Right, cause if we all get the alert and if you live on a hill in Montpellier, probably like, I don't know if I need to do this. Whereas if you're on Elm Street, it might be like, is this real or not? Elm Street, Main Street, you know, the side streets there, they need it. Yeah, but that gets to your idea. The Roboconny hearing Lily's voice at six in the morning, no, it's no school, so it's a little easier. But even like your other idea, like zones too. Well zones, yeah. Cause then the zones could feed in to the other conversations we've had about getting to people differently where it's geo target, it's phones, it's emails, it's Knox, it's this, it's out, you know, cause to get everyone that's going to take a path, like a network. I wanted to change topics. Yes. If that's okay. I mean, just one thought for after the fact was, so I've rent downtown, I live right on State Street, right on the bridge, so directly affected. But as a renter, and we've heard this from a lot of renters in the area, like information after the fact didn't exist. And I know we should expect that from our landlord or from the owners of the building, but they were so straight out with dealing with basements and the emergency that we weren't getting any information as to it. So like when we actually stayed in Capitol Plaza the night of the flood and couldn't leave there till the water receded to kind of trudge all the way around to get to State Street. And didn't even know if we actually could really go beat our building. Like there was nobody to really ask. So it's just, and I know that that just the chaos that, you know, just everything that was going on immediately after, it's like that hub of information. I know when doing the disaster work, one of the important things was having consistent timely information available to people during a disaster. So they knew what time of update was gonna come. And I think the city did that a lot, but not necessarily specific to renters. I think we're like a whole other, and I don't even know if I would, I guess you could put homeowners in there too, but it's just as a homeowner, you answer to yourself. You don't have somebody who's inspecting your building. Or yeah, so, and then there's questions like that. Like I just found out because I actually emailed the fire marshal, I see all these placards going up on the buildings. Oh, don't go in here, you know, if there's green, there's yellow. And then I think we saw a really bad color. And I'm like, okay, nothing has shown up on our door. I don't know what that means. You know, but you can tell me, like my landlord's not telling me anything. So finally, you know, the fire marshal said, we did an inspector building. I'm like, okay, I don't know if I like that or not, but okay. What would have been like thinking about your experience in your neighbors, what would have been some effective ways to get you that information? And I don't know, again, because you're talking about landlords and owners or property managers and owners. So I don't know how you have to do that, but just having some kind of immediate communication with your tenants, like we're all on this, it's the same thing, like we have each other's phone numbers in the building. So we all communicate, but we're not getting information from the source that we need it from. So, you know, and I don't think you can make them, be like, oh, within 24 hours, you have to give your tenants information, but like somebody should be giving, I mean, giving us information so that we know we're in safe, that it's safe to be there. So that's just, yeah, it's just that. One second, yeah, I do think we have like one or two more minutes and then we need to sort of review the big topics and try to come to consensus on a couple that we really think need to be moved on. And I want to be clear on that too. It doesn't mean that the other topics that were talked about are lost. It's all been written down and it will be used as we move forward, but we want to try to come, but I do want to, like if we can all do this in like two minutes, because this might take a little robust conversation and narrow this down, but. As we talked about other types of events such as fire and other emergencies, evacuation routes become important. And I'm a map person, so I looked for my evacuation route when I moved into my neighborhood. Does the city have evacuation plans? We have plans, but plans are difficult because you can only go into so much detail because what are you planning for? Right, but I'm just thinking that when you check into a hotel, you've got a map on the back of the door. We're telling you how to get out of that building. And a lot of people are not going to be proactive or think well on their feet. I've worked with the general public. I've seen this. So evacuation plans is part of the emergency response. I know you have, did you one more quick thought? I was just wondering who said something about this city had sent out 14 or 16 notices. Who has that information? 18. I didn't hear anything. So that blackboard in front of you, and again, people get information in different ways. Oh, you mean this? Yeah. If you sign up for that, you get a different text. I have this. Oh, all right. So maybe there's something. I guess I was waiting for the city. I didn't hear from city leaders for quite a few days. Which we covered. So we're going to have to transition. Dan, 30 seconds. Okay, as I tried to say before, I think we need a full kind of, we'll call it citizen commission that works at all of the stuff because there were so many failures what I'm hearing from us. We didn't get notification. There were nobody showing up for stuff. I think we need a bigger thing than this session to start looking at this. And it's not, you know, we've had lots of little things that have come out of this, but I think we actually need something that is larger, that is independent of the city, of the state, but would have some influence on what happens to both of them. Because I don't think we have any other mechanism that is certified through official channels that's going to make any difference. Thank you. And I'll start with you. While I mentioned about the outreach person with the homeless and how she tries to notify everyone she knows that's homeless about things, I want to note that even though they may get notification, how would they leave where they are to get to safety? So that's like a transportation issue for them and a connection issue that they might not have but the citizen that's right in a village might have somebody that's in the woods or that's near town, they don't have that transportation. So a solution would be having whoever is the volunteer groups having ways to help folks get to a safe place. Like it's not enough to just be like you're not safe here. That doesn't really accomplish much of it. So let's quickly, Maddie. I've been taking notes. I've heard a few themes emerge, but what would be really helpful is if we can kind of just listen to some of the themes and some of the broader topics that we talked about and think about what are the ones and I guess this conversation has been great because we actually moved towards solutions. I thought people would be like the federal government has to do this. This conversation was like, we have to do this. The city has to do this. It's very local. So this was pretty gratifying. What are our thoughts? I'll run through, there are three main buckets that we talked about and they're all interrelated but the three main themes are accessibility of information and notification systems. So needing to make notification systems more robust accessible by all folks in Montpelier. The second, I'll dive into some more specifics there in a second. The second main theme is adequate warning and notice so people can help each other and can help businesses in town. And then the third is dedicating resources to building out either a volunteer network that has professional support training and financial backing. So that might look like reinvigorating or evolving can and so that's the third main bucket but I also just wanted to highlight that one other theme that I heard little bits and pieces of that we didn't talk about explicitly was a lot of folks were talking about the need to practice and get in the habit of doing something. And that's something where maybe having a more dedicated volunteer base that has established procedures and communication plans in connection with neighbors and community can help with that. So again, top main themes are accessibility of information and notification systems adequate warning and notice so that folks can help each other and mobilize ahead of time and mobilize perhaps after and notify people that are after events. And then again, dedicated resources for making the community more connected to a volunteer network that's ready to go and that is practicing emergency preparedness. So, that might be it but underneath the three we have more specifics in terms of like we talked about the siren, we talked about the location, the geotargeting like so we also have that captured. Yep. I like the idea of, well, I should turn to you all. Like, yeah. I can talk about some of those. Yeah, just listen to see if it's capturing the conversation or not and what we've missed. So, for accessibility of information and notification systems, we talked about mechanisms. So, non-online resources that are specific to Montpelier plans. So, talking about having more print resources available for emergency plans that Montpelier already has in place or is maybe going to develop in the future. Groups of volunteers who go door to door and visit folks in person. So, identifying vulnerable populations that we visit before emergency events. Siren, which could help broadcast notification for all different types of hazards whether it be snow, extreme heat, flood, fire. We also talked about encouraging folks to sign up for VT Alert and maybe more education around how to sign up for VT Alert and having that education be more frequent through fliers and your water belt. Better coordination with local radio stations for folks who might not be online or have a cell phone. And then again, just more frequent communication overall and practicing the emergency preparedness and making sure that those notification systems are in place and are ready to be activated if they need to be. And then would we capture in there, do you have us in a different bucket, the idea of communicating through the water belt? That's in that bucket. Okay, good. Did that reach tenants? No. I haven't seen it yet, but I haven't seen it. Yeah, no. So, we'd have to think about that from the accessibility standpoint. Yep. We'd have to think about it from that box. Right, or like you said, like a random door, is running out of boxes. I didn't see that, did that, it was helpful. Yep. There was no mention anywhere in here, although there's supposedly a plan on paper. Who is responsible? That's what I'm waiting for. Who in the city is supposed to be doing what, when, how? Okay, these are all nice, specific things that could be done, but I haven't heard anywhere how this supposed plan gets translated into the reality that we're living in. Well, I think that's what's happening now. So, yeah, I think we can all agree that, yeah. The shelter situation at the middle school or something, if that's gonna be a place, there's probably not that hard to like always have water and cats some there, like at all times they could pull out if there's an issue. I don't know. I would add that, yep, one last baby thought. And then again, think if there's anything we missed. Again, all, everything that we talked about is captured. So if you're not hearing the immediate thing, but we should wrap. Oh, as we mentioned that, when you get a flood like this, of course it's a real, it's the wake-up call. You saw all these people tonight coming in, and before that, they've become to sort of complacency. And it's like people who live near a volcano. Oh, it's never gonna happen, it never did. So, and I don't think it's all waiting for the state or the city. Everybody's got a responsibility to try to be informed, and even though it's difficult. So we can improve, but we all gotta step up and realize that these things will happen. Well, I think that is a good place to end. I wanna thank you all. This has been a very thoughtful conversation, and thank you all very much. Thank you.