As Vermont’s weather worsens, emergency communications aren’t reaching all rural residents

August 3, 2024  |  By Emma Malinak and Theo Wells-Spackman | VTDigger

This story was posted originally on VTDigger.org on July 28.

Pratt’s Store in Bridport, seen on Friday, July 26, is a hub of information for residents in times of crisis like the recent floods. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

As floodwaters swept through Vermont earlier this month, communities sought to share and receive emergency updates as quickly as possible. Some turned to town Facebook pages, some exchanged observations with neighbors at the general store, and some waited for official updates to get the information they needed to stay safe. 

Clear, timely alerts “could be imperative for life safety,” said Brett LaRose, the operations and logistics chief for Vermont Emergency Management. In an emergency, he said, every second counts.

When Vermonters waste time making calls and scanning social media platforms in search of updates they can trust, they have less time to prepare for flooding events and, eventually, to recover from them, according to Jason Van Driesche, chief of staff for the communications platform Front Porch Forum.

“People need good information right away so they can get back to whatever they have to do to deal with the emergency,” he said.

Though a statewide alert system — Vermont Emergency Management’s VT-ALERT platform — disperses location-specific information via text, email, phone calls and a mobile app, it doesn’t have a broad reach. 

As floodwaters swept through Vermont earlier this month, communities sought to share and receive emergency updates as quickly as possible. Some turned to town Facebook pages, some exchanged observations with neighbors at the general store, and some waited for official updates to get the information they needed to stay safe. 

Clear, timely alerts “could be imperative for life safety,” said Brett LaRose, the operations and logistics chief for Vermont Emergency Management. In an emergency, he said, every second counts.

When Vermonters waste time making calls and scanning social media platforms in search of updates they can trust, they have less time to prepare for flooding events and, eventually, to recover from them, according to Jason Van Driesche, chief of staff for the communications platform Front Porch Forum.

“People need good information right away so they can get back to whatever they have to do to deal with the emergency,” he said.

Though a statewide alert system — Vermont Emergency Management’s VT-ALERT platform — disperses location-specific information via text, email, phone calls and a mobile app, it doesn’t have a broad reach. 

Town officials sometimes use other virtual platforms that have a wider reach.

Front Porch Forum has about 235,000 members in Vermont, Van Driesche said — almost four times the number of VT-ALERT subscribers. Even though crisis communications have never been “front and center” in the company’s mission, he said, announcements about road closures, emergency shelters and more have become more common as town officials use the platform as their megaphone during crises. 

But even Front Porch Forum posts take time to craft and distribute to subscribers — time that town officials might not have at the height of an emergency. 

‘Friends and neighbors’

In the Addison County town of Bridport, locals often report emergencies to Pratt’s Store, according to Corey Pratt, the general store’s owner. Pratt, who is also a member of the volunteer fire department, said that when news about flood damage came in during last summer’s historic storm, and then again earlier this month, he was among the first to know.

“We find out almost immediately when something’s wrong,” he said. “We really find that we’re a first response to it.”

He said he often calls in his reports to town officials.

Addison Town Clerk Cheri Waterman, whose office is 10 minutes down the road, said she had heard important flood updates through word of mouth and Facebook. The washout of Route 17 on July 11 made its way to her “3rd, 4th, 5th-hand” in a system of what she calls “local intel.”

Pratt said he isn’t always prepared to be a de facto public official. People call him about everything from “a lady with a cat stuck in her tree” to genuine emergencies, sometimes instead of calling 911, he said. 

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” he said, laughing. But when push comes to shove, he’s always willing to help out. “They’re not just our customers — they’re our friends and neighbors,” he said.

Other rural towns rely on networks similar to Addison’s “local intel,” but create community forums on virtual platforms rather than in the general store.

In the Northeast Kingdom town of Lyndon, town officials use Facebook as their main avenue to communicate with residents, according to Assistant Town Clerk Denise Montgomery. In the wake of this month’s floods, posts have ranged from boil water notices to instructions for how to report flood damage. 

But the Facebook page only has 490 subscribers — less than 10% of Lyndon’s population. Another Facebook page, which announces general information for a broader area including nearby St. Johnsbury, has 4,600 subscribers. Those platforms are how residents can stay informed, Montgomery said, both during emergencies and otherwise.  

Lyndon leaders don’t send updates to the state officials who run VT-ALERT, according to Montgomery. “We just don’t have the time to get on board (with VT-ALERT) right now,” she said, considering the energy and resources it takes to recover from the floods — especially in Caledonia County, which saw the most rainfall during the July 10 storm.

For most town officials in Canaan, this month’s flooding was their first major emergency, according to Town Clerk Zachary Brown. The Essex County town was relatively unscathed in last summer’s floods, but “we paid for it this year,” he said wryly.

Brown, too, largely communicated with his constituents via the town Facebook page, and its website. Though he felt confident that the community was generally kept informed, the town’s staff members were nonetheless pushed to their limit.

Small towns like Canaan have just enough capacity to run day-to-day operations, he said. So, “in an emergency, no one’s actually prepared.”

“We rely on volunteers stepping up,” he said.

Brown said the town hadn’t previously signed up to operate VT-ALERT locally, but given the events of the last few weeks, he plans to change that.

Town leaders aren’t alone. State lawmakers also report feeling overstretched when it comes to updating community members about emergencies.

Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, said that she has become a source of emergency information for her constituents. During the pandemic, she began releasing updates and resources via email and Front Porch Forum. “I heard from a lot of constituents that I was really the only one that provided them with information,” she said. 

“I take that really seriously, as part of my responsibilities as a state senator,” she continued, “especially in times of crisis.”

These means of communication all take time and money. At the moment, Hardy said, it feels like a public service that’s being privately funded.

Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, agrees with Hardy that the model must change. He said relying on under-resourced individuals in rural communities is not a sustainable model for emergency communications, especially when volunteer emergency management directors have limited bandwidth and little professional assistance.

And while there are three regional coordinators for Vermont Emergency Management — responsible for connecting local officials with the department’s resources — Perchlik said they are spread too thin to be substantially helpful on a local level. “It's hard for that coordinator to be that much of a resource for all those little towns,” he said.

“I don't have good answers,” Perchlik said, acknowledging the lack of funding for more professional staff in such small towns. He mentioned the possibility of audible sirens, of the kind that some local fire departments still use, to alert the public of possible threats.

Sirens could potentially reach additional people, especially in areas where cell phone networks are weak. A December 2022 report from the state Department of Public Service found that AT&T had the highest rate of call reliability, with just 55% of Vermont's buildings — including homes and businesses — located in areas where all AT&T calls go through successfully.

‘Only so much time’ 

Darwin Pratt, left, works the front counter at Pratt’s Store in Bridport with his daughter Stacey Stone and son Corey Pratt on Friday, July 26. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Montpelier’s communications coordinator, Evelyn Prim, said the city is exploring all avenues of emergency alerts, including a city-specific alert system.

“People are busy. They have lives. They don't have time to read every newsletter,” Prim said. “So it’s all about having many systems in place so that people have options and don't have to spend time wondering what to do when an emergency strikes.”

Prim said VT-ALERT is Montpelier’s “first line of defense” in emergency situations, largely because it has the widest reach of any of the city’s communication platforms, with about 10,000 subscribers. For hyper-local alerts, she can choose which subscribers within the region will receive messages. That comes in handy during floods, she said, when just a few feet in elevation can change how much a household is at risk. 

“We have hills and waterways and low-lying areas and such a diverse landscape,” Prim said. “With (VT-ALERT) we don't have to constantly bombard everyone with things that don't necessarily apply to them. We can target it.”

According to LaRose at Vermont Emergency Management, this is the best possible solution. “Nobody knows their communities better than the people that work and live in them,” he said. While state officials can issue local messages through the VT-ALERT system without input from town leaders, those messages are more targeted and timely when generated from within town lines.

But Prim also relies on other platforms, including Front Porch Forum, Facebook, Instagram and Notify Me — a messaging system run through the city’s website — to make sure residents can access emergency updates regardless of what technology they have access to. 

Crafting accurate and efficient posts on each of those platforms takes time, Prim said, and wouldn’t be possible without a full-time communications administrator like her. Even so, “there’s only so much time in the day when you’re a department of one,” she said.

But having access to an alert system — and the staff to run it — is just the first step, she said. Cities also need residents who are willing to sign up to receive messages, and that engagement is never guaranteed.

Towns without communications departments have to get creative, according to Waterbury Municipal Manager Tom Leitz. When floods left many Waterbury homes and businesses underwater in July 2023, the town didn’t even have a Facebook page to communicate with its residents, he said. He started one a week later to start sharing information about flood recovery resources. 

“We saw a need to fill that gap,” he said. “You need to have access to information to know how to respond to an emergency like this.”

For the past year, he’s looked for an alert system that would best fit Waterbury’s needs. He said he found it in a system called TextMyGov, a platform also used by Middlebury.
“The great irony,” he said, is that he wasn’t able to schedule his training for the system until July 10, 2024 — the day the rain that fueled this summer’s floods began.

He said the town will start rolling out the new system by the end of the month. Leitz opted for the system because it facilitates communication from town officials to residents, and vice versa. Once enrolled, residents can make reports to the town — including everything from flagging mundane problems such as potholes to sending crucial updates about flood damage, he said.

The platform will allow Leitz to get emergency updates to residents instantaneously, rather than hoping they find his messages in a stream of non-urgent Facebook or Front Porch Forum posts “about garage sales and missing pets.”

The system will eat into the town’s budget with its $5,000 annual operating fee and will add more to Leitz’s already overflowing plate of town responsibilities. But “it’s worth it,” he said, to keep locals informed and safe.

Stacey Stone answers the phone at the front counter of Pratt’s Store in Bridport on Friday, July 26. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Preparing for the future of emergency communications

Town officials interviewed by VTDigger — even those with formal alert systems in place — said they still rely on some unofficial communication platforms, such as Facebook and Front Porch Forum, to send alerts during emergencies. 

But some worry that informal platforms won’t always meet their needs.

For example, while public officials can use Front Porch Forum for free, they are limited in how much they can post “in order to keep the conversation centered on neighbors,” Van Driesche said. According to the company’s terms of use, Front Porch Forum can “set limits on the maximum number and/or size” of posts and “may reduce or eliminate the ability of selected categories of public officials to post on (Front Porch Forum) for a period of time before an election.”

Van Driesche said Front Porch Forum “typically exempt(s) any posting related to a significant emergency from those limits.” And Front Porch Forum staff members publish emergency alerts from town officials as soon as they come in, rather than waiting to post them in the typical evening newsletter, according to Chloe Tomlinson, the company’s community division director.

But Prim, in Montpelier, said Front Porch Forum staff didn’t consider her flood alerts this month to be related to a “significant emergency,” so she had to take steps to limit how much each city official was posting.

Hardy said that, at the moment, she can only post on Front Porch Forum twice a month — which isn’t enough to address locals’ concerns about flood recovery.

The Addison County senator chairs the Senate Government Operations Committee, and said she worked to address issues of emergency preparedness in the last legislative session. Act 143 provides for a number of improvements to emergency communications — including reviews of existing systems and expansion of their accessibility — as well as more cooperation between VT-ALERTS and the state’s Enhanced 911 Board.

That law took effect on July 1. “Obviously, they weren't able to do anything in those 11 days (before this year’s flooding) to make any improvements,” Hardy said.

LaRose said that after the passage of Act 143, a task force was assembled to improve the state's emergency preparedness, including its alert systems. The goal of the group, he said, is to “find solutions to be able to communicate with all people that live in the state of Vermont.”

This includes people with limited internet connection, people whose first language is not English, and people who are hard of hearing, he said.

Hardy said expanding accessibility is important but emphasized that it’s only a start. “It's not an issue that we could solve just by passing a bill,” she said.

Some cities are taking the state’s lead and are reforming their communication systems now to prepare for the future. 

“It's really important in this day and age of a changing climate to figure out the right way to distribute urgent information,” said Robert Goulding, public information manager for Burlington’s public works department.

Although there was no need to send alerts in Burlington during this month’s floods, the city is constantly expanding its understanding and use of VT-ALERT so it is prepared for future crises, according to Goulding. Burlington was “fairly limited in rapid and effective communication” before 2020, but now alerts “reach pockets in milliseconds,” he said — about 20,000 pockets to be precise, meaning almost half the city’s population.

It’s all to ensure that Burlington is prepared, he said. 

“I imagine, as floods become more dire and rainfall becomes more intense, that we are going to unfortunately have more use for (VT-ALERT),” he said. “Luckily, we have a tool like it in place.”