After a few hours of heavy rain on the afternoon of July 10, some residents and drivers in Acworth were cut off and stranded.
“We didn't know where roads were ending and beginning," said Jennifer Bland, the town’s emergency management director.
Flooding on that July afternoon washed out 32 roads in Acworth. Some with major damage are still closed, and will be for a while, Bland said.
Small towns in New Hampshire are still rebuilding from the floods this summer. And as climate change drives more intense rainfall and flooding, some say the process for responding to these disasters needs to change.
In Acworth, half of Crane Brook Road was completely gone the day I visited. The rest of the road looked like a steep cliff, ending in a deep hole, about ten feet wide and eight feet deep. It was sharp and sudden, like the water cut through the asphalt and concrete like a slice of cake.
Bland and her three person team have been working around the clock to get town roads passable. And this is not the first time Acworth’s roads have been wrecked.
Two years ago, in July of 2021, massive flooding washed out exactly the same 32 roads.
Acworth spent a million and a half dollars repairing just Crane Brook. And in a matter of hours it washed out again.
“Realistically, I don't know how the town can afford to put this road back together with what it needs, with what we have,” Bland said, looking over Crane Brook road. “We don't have this money.”
Early estimates put this summer’s damages at about $20 million. That’s nearly 15 times the town’s $1.5 million yearly budget.
Residents in Acworth say they’re worried that the disasters will keep coming faster than they can pay for repairs or build infrastructure that could survive more intense storms.
Claudia Istel has lived in Acworth for more than 40 years. She’s a former teacher, and on the town’s budget committee. She says she’s noticed the effects of climate change in town, even just with the flooding in the last couple of years.
“We all knew after the 2021 flood, we were taking out the loan and we had the plan for working, everybody was holding their breath and saying, you know, we need to pray that there's not going to be another big event before we can finish fixing this one,” she said.
As the climate changes, New Hampshire is getting wetter. Dartmouth professor Jonathan Winter studies extreme precipitation, and he says the atmosphere is like a bucket. In the past, it’s been a medium-sized bucket, which could hold a medium sized amount of water.
But, Winter says, climate change has made the atmosphere warmer – and a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor.
“Now you have a bigger bucket,” he said. “So every time we get the right conditions, there's a bigger bucket worth of water dumped on the landscape.”
Read more on the causes of this summer’s rains from NHPR’s By Degrees
All that water is hard for land to absorb and causes the kind of flooding towns saw this July.
As these multimillion-dollar flooding disasters become more common, Acworth selectperson Kathi Bradt says small towns will need help.
When big disasters like flooding happen, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, can help with money for repairs, if the president issues a major disaster declaration.
But towns have to pay up front and wait for the federal government to reimburse them. Acworth’s budget couldn’t cover everything they needed in 2021, so they had to take out a $2 million loan. The town hit their borrowing limit. And they’ve only been reimbursed for about $25,000 so far.
“We can't stand up in front of the taxpayers and ask them to keep funding the same thing over and over again. I can't do that,” Bradt said. “We need some new solutions.”
William Roy, FEMA’s coordinating officer for the 2021 disasters, says the length of time a town waits for reimbursement can vary, and there are many factors involved in the paperwork for repairs that can hold things up.
“The public assistance program is always under review and how the agency can make the processes more effective and efficient,” he said, citing a recent change to the definition of “small projects,” which require less bureaucratic work, to allow more projects to fall into that category.
According to FEMA press secretary Jeremy Edwards, the agency has made climate change a priority under the Biden administration, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law increased funding for the agency’s hazard mitigation program.
In New Hampshire, state lawmakers created a program last year to help towns with upfront pay for repairs. New Hampshire officials say that is up and running; towns can apply for a loan up to the amount FEMA has said they’ll reimburse.
Communities that need help applying for those funds can reach out to the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management at 603-271-2231.
The state also has a program that can help towns with hazard mitigation, or efforts to break the cycle of damage and repair. FEMA helps with that too, in some cases.
Bradt says the town wants to do that work, but when you’re trying to come back from a disaster, it can be difficult.
“It’s a longer process. There's more engineering, there's more cost comparison involved. You have to kind of prove that the new way is going to be more cost effective. That's a burden to put on a small community,” she said.
Leaders in Acworth have proposed creating a task force that could include state officials, planning commissions, and researchers to assess areas where infrastructure has been repeatedly destroyed. The task force could help make recommendations for building more resilient roads on a budget the town could handle. They say the task force could serve as a model for other rural communities in New Hampshire who struggle with the same things.
Meanwhile, in town, some roads are still impassable. A brook that runs through south Acworth was rerouted during the storm, and now runs underneath a church and a community center. Residents say it’s starting to undermine the buildings’ foundations.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Bland is keeping an eye on the sky.
“Every time it rains, we're watching the weather,” she said. “We’re prepared for it to happen again.”
