BRIDGEWATER, Vt. (AP) - A top White House official heard Thursday how Vermont is trying to reduce the threat of damage from natural disasters by taking to heart lessons learned after 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene and other storms.
Gov. Peter Shumlin and Michael Boots, acting chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, stopped briefly in Bridgewater at the site of what had been a gas station.
The property, at the intersection of U.S. Route 4 and Vermont 100 in the Green Mountains, is now awaiting demolition. The plan is to rebuild the land to its former level so that any future flooding from a nearby river doesn’t cause as much damage.
Boots said the visit was an opportunity for him to learn how extreme weather affects different parts of the country.
After the Bridgewater stop, the officials visited Green Mountain Power’s Energy Innovation Center in Rutland.
The state’s largest electric utility has restored a dilapidated building there as part of the company effort to help Vermont become more energy efficient and prevent waste, a move seen by state officials as a preventative measure against worsening storms brought about by climate change.
Shumlin said the question for government agencies across the country is how to go forward together to face natural disasters.
“How can we make specific recommendation to … all the various agencies we work with to have a smarter, more streamlined process going forward that actually recognizes that it is no longer, unfortunately, a 100-year event. These seem to be year-to-year or even month-to-month,” Shumlin said.
Shumlin told Boots that after Irene, Vermont learned more about coordinating local, state, and federal agencies to recover from and prepare for disasters. Some measures he cited were replacing flood-destroyed culverts or bridges with structures of a bigger size to make them less vulnerable to damage from floods and other disasters.
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