Flooded Waterbury homeowners in limbo on FEMA buyouts
By Camryn Brauns | Community News ServiceUPDATE Aug. 1: This story was updated with more details from FEMA on the pending buyout applications.
Aug. 5: The FEMA payment structure description has been corrected from an earlier version. FEMA pays 75% of the full buyout cost.
Tasha Greene and husband Danny Carpenter have spent 18 years in Waterbury with only U.S. Route 2 separating their 2 1/2-acre lot from the banks of the Winooski River. They’re no strangers to flooding — but last year’s catastrophic floods proved too much.
Owners of several homes along Union Street in Waterbury (center) are pursuing buyouts after multiple floods, the most recent on July 10-11. Photo by Gordon Miller
“We had to basically gut the whole house,” Greene said.
“The property has probably flooded five or six times now,” she said later. “We can’t continue to do this, and if this continues, I don’t know what we are going to do.”
Barely catching a break from last year’s damages, Greene said her garage took in four feet of water and the home’s insulation was damaged from this month’s floods, too.
Greene and Carpenter are two of several Waterbury property owners the town has approved for Federal Emergency Management Agency buyouts for flood-damaged homes following last year’s crisis. The goal: turn those problem properties into permanent green spaces owned by the town.
But as of mid-July, none of the property owners nor local officials have heard back from FEMA — and in all cases, they’ve been waiting for months. A year after floods ripped through Vermont, they have been left in the lurch.
Richard Verville, deputy director of FEMA’s hazard mitigation division for the region, said in an interview at the end of July that a typical wait time is six months to a year depending on the details of the case. He said he’s seen these applications moving faster than ever before.
“Everything that Vermont has submitted to date is in the final stages of the review process,” Verville said. “All reviews are underway, and consultation letters have been sent out to the various regulatory federal agencies.”
FEMA does not submit updates directly to property owners, but officials have monthly status calls with the state to review the application status of each property. On a weekly basis, pending questions or issues may be discussed by grant points of contact and someone from the state. “Every property is a little bit different,” Verville said. “Some may be of historic nature, and some may not, so it depends on the nature of that particular project in order to move them through to a final award.”
State Chief Recovery Officer Doug Farham, who has been working with Vermont Emergency Management on the buyout program, said FEMA is doing its best in getting data modernized. “But I think the timing is probably the hardest thing for the human side of things,” Farnham said. “Most people have mortgages, and so paying a mortgage on a property you can’t even live in while you’re waiting for two years can be very difficult for people, mentally and financially.”
Farnham connected the wait to other floods in the past year that interrupted updates to the state’s flood zone maps, which help determine eligibility for the buyout program. According to Vermont Emergency Management, wait times for approval could go for several months to a year.
With limited options for recovery from water damage, property owners in Waterbury looked to their municipality for help after the catastrophe last summer and again in December.
The buyout program is for property owners who have suffered or are at risk of flood damage. Local officials have to approve the applications, then FEMA decides how much to give towns to buy the properties. “The federal agency pays 75% of the buyout costs, including the property’s full market value pre-damage and things like demolition, and the remainder is covered by the state — so local governments don’t have to spend,” Farnham said.
FEMA also offers grants for people to relocate.
Homeowners with properties flooded last July 2023 have until Aug. 16 to apply to particpate in the federal buyout program. Photo by Gordon Miller
The last day people affected by the July 2023 floods can apply for the buyouts is Aug. 16, town leaders said. And now with the impacts of yet another flood burdening Waterbury, officials are encouraging residents to apply for buyouts.
In recent discussions with the select board, Leitz noted that homeowners are not bound to go through with the buyout until they get a purchase price from FEMA. If they aren’t satisfied, they don’t have to sell. One benefit to the transaction, he pointed out, is that it doesn’t involve a real estate agent, so the homeowner does not have to pay a typical commission.
To date, six Waterbury property owners have applied for a buyout grant following the July and December 2023 floods, including Greene and Carpenter, who are seeking relocation funding. The Waterbury Select Board has approved all of them but they are still awaiting FEMA’s green light.
Waterbury Town Manager Tom Leitz said on July 11 that he had yet to hear from FEMA since the select board approved the buyout applications. The town is generally supportive of the program, he said.
“I know after Hurricane Irene, the town’s position was more the opposite, but given now with two floods in the past year, I think that position has changed,” Leitz said. “And I think much of that arises from public safety perspectives where these flood zone properties are bought out.”
In the frequently flooded corridor along North Main Street in Waterbury, number 33 - shown flooded on Dec. 18, 2023 - is on a list of homes awaiting word from FEMA regarding a buyout. Photo by Gordon Miller
Of the six properties with buyout applications in progress, three of them are located on lower Union Street across from the intersection with Armory Drive; another is across the railroad tracks at 33 North Main Street. Two including the Green/Carpenter home are on U.S. Route 2 on the west end of town. The select board at its July 15 meeting reviewed the first buyout request from Randall Street but chose to postpone a decision to discuss the matter further with homeowner Brian Kravitz.
Greene, whose family remains on their problem property, understands those struggles firsthand in dealing with years of flood damages since Irene. A culvert running underneath the road by her home often overflows onto the property, she said, as do drains from the interstate. After the July 2023 floods, she found her biggest outlet of support from her town.
“They had different people and groups that came around and helped out,” Greene said. “I think that was a huge difference (from the past).”
Another Waterbury property owner to suffer flood damage last year, Jack Exe, said his support system came from Tom Drake, the town’s flood recovery coordinator, and the volunteers who cleared debris from his Union Street basement last July.
“He was helping people muck out their basements, finding people to help empty their basements along with Waterbury EMT,” Exe said. “They loaded (a dumpster) up, and I came back a few days later and everything was gone.”
Exe was approved for a buyout grant by the select board last December, just days after the floods that month, when he decided he could no longer afford to continue renovations on his property. He had been renting it out to people, but it has sat vacant ever since the July 2023 flooding.
“I thought of different ideas — if we had the money, we could raise it up and have it overlooking the railroad tracks — but that’s just a pie-in-the-sky dream,” Exe said.
Though he continues to wait for further approval from FEMA, Exe has stayed sunny about his situation and the future of his property.
“The way I look at it, it could have been a lot worse, and it could have been a lot better,” he said of the catastrophic floods last summer. “There are other people in the state worse off than I am, so I’m just grateful it wasn’t any worse.”
The University of Vermont’s Community News Service journalism internship program reports for Vermont news outlets including the Waterbury Roundabout.