The video I've been seeing of Vermont on New England Cable News has been truly horrifying. Huge masses of brown, silty water raging through towns, taking out bridges, roads, and houses, in some cases completely cutting off towns from all outside access. Similarly in western MA, like Shelburne Falls. They ended up getting a fair amount of rain, and the mountains just funneled it all together. What are normally small streams turned into massive churning rivers.
I went through a similar flood of the Big Sandy River in eastern KY back in 1977, in the coal country hills next to West Virginia. In one day, the river overtopped its banks and rose so that we had 10 ft of water in our front yard. It took several days to recede. This floodwater was much slower than the water in Vermont, with much less destructive hydraulic force. It didn't do nearly so much structural damage. But it left a good 3 inch layer of very fine, stinking, silted mud over everything. This stuff was very slippery, so the first days of cleanup were slipping and sliding around in all this trying to push it out of the houses and off the roads and sidewalks.
I completely disassembled all our household appliances and cleaned them out and was able to get everything back to work. The most amazing one was our portable dishwater, which we had left unplugged and disconnected in the kitchen. When I disassembled the water pump, it was packed solid with mud. And of course everything took weeks to dry out, walls and furniture warping. The mud just turned to fine dust that blew around for the next year.
Ever since, I've had a lot of sympathy for anyone who gets flooded. It's just a mess. The parts of Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts that got hit will have a long, hard recovery from the massive damage they sustained.
Steve, mostly hand tools. Click on my name above and click on "Visit Homepage" to see my woodworking blog.