My favorite town in Vermont is Rochester. I like to stop there going both ways while driving my kid to summer camp, which means I do that up to four times per summer. It’s one of those postcard-perfect places, rich in history, gracing a lush valley along the White River, deep in the Green Mountains, with a park and a bandstand, pretty white churches and charm to the brim.
My last stop there was on August 20, when I shot the picture above in the front yard of Sandy’s Books & Bakery, after having lunch in the Rochester Cafe across the street. Not shown are the 200+ cyclists (motor and pedal) who had just come through town on the Last Mile Ride to raise funds for the Gifford Medical Center‘s end-of-life care.
After Hurricane Irene came through, one might have wondered if Rochester itself might need the Center’s services. Rochester was one of more than a dozen Vermont towns that were isolated when all its main roads were washed out. This series of photos from The Republican tells just part of the story. The town’s website is devoted entirely to The Situation. Here’s a copy-and-paste of its main text:
Relief For Rochester
Among the town’s losses was a large section of Woodlawn Cemetery, much of which was carved away when a gentle brook turned into a hydraulic mine. Reports Mark Davis of Valley News,
Rochester also suffered a different kind of nightmare. A gentle downtown brook swelled into a torrent and ripped through Woodlawn Cemetery, unearthing about 25 caskets and strewing their remains throughout downtown.
Many of the graves were about 30 years old, and none of the burials was recent.Yesterday, those remains were still outside, covered by blue tarps.
Scattered bones on both sides of Route 100 were marked by small red flags.
“We can’t do anything for these poor people except pick it up,” said Randolph resident Tom Harty, a former state trooper and funeral home director who is leading the effort to recover the remains.
It was more than 48 hours before officials in Rochester — which was cut off from surrounding towns until Tuesday — could turn their attention to the problem: For a time, an open casket lay in the middle of Route 100, the town’s main thoroughfare, the remains plainly visible.
I found that article, like so much else about Vermont, on VPR News, one of Vermont Public Radio‘s many services. When the going gets tough, the tough use radio. During and after natural disasters, radio is the go-to medium. And no radio service covers or serves Vermont better than VPR. The station has five full-size stations covering most of the state, with gaps filled in by five more low-power translators. (VPR also has six classical stations, with their own six translators.) When I drive around the state it’s the single radio source I can get pretty much everywhere. I doubt any other station or network comes close. Ground conductivity in Vermont is extremely low, so AM waves don’t go far, and there aren’t any big stations in Vermont on AM anyway. And no FM station is bigger, or has as many signals, as VPR.
One big reason VPR does so much, so well, is that it serves its customers, which are its listeners. That’s Marketing 101, but it’s also unique to noncommercial radio in the U.S. Commercial radio’s customers are its advertisers.
VPR’s services only begin with what it does on the air. Reporting is boffo too. Here’s VPR’s report on Rochester last Thursday, in several audio forms, as well as by transcription on that Web page. They use the Web exceptionally well, including a thick stream of tweets at @vprnet.
I don’t doubt there are many other media doing great jobs in Vermont. And at the local level I’m sure some stations, papers and online media do as good a job as VPR does state-wide.
But VPR is the one I follow elsewhere as well as in Vermont, and I want to do is make sure it gets the high five it deserves. If you have others (or corrections to the above), tell me in the comments below.
Some additional links:
- VTIrene Crowdmap (using code from Ushahidi)
- A guide to flood relief (VTdiggers.org)
- Rochester, Vermont Hit Hard By Irene (huffingtonpost.com)
- Residents lean on each other in cutoff Vt. town (msnbc.msn.com)
- In cut-off Vt. town, coffins and smashed houses (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- In Cut-off Vt. Town, Coffins and Smashed Houses (abcnews.go.com)
- Aid Workers Reach Vermont Towns Cut Off by Floodwaters – New York Times (news.google.com)
- Relief Workers Reach Most Vermont Towns Isolated by Floodwaters (nytimes.com)
- Vermont Remains Hopeful in Midst of Disaster (abcnews.go.com)
- Putting a Face to Irene’s Damage (farmsafevt.wordpress.com)
- National Guard Airlifts Supplies to Vermont Towns (newser.com)
- Irene Aftermath: My Vermont Town Has Been Devastated (bilerico.com)
- Tropical storm Irene isolates battered Vermont town from outside world (nj.com)
- Helping Vermont [bioephemera] (scienceblogs.com)
- Washed Out Bridges Strand Vermont’s Small Towns (npr.org)
- Vermont Towns Totally Cut Off: National Guard Delivering Food and Water by Helicopter (shoppingblog.com)
- Covered Bridges Lost as Irene Brings Major Flood to Vermont (businessweek.com)
- How Long Can You Hold Your Breath? (lezgetreal.com)
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