This story was originally produced by The Keene Sentinel. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
On a sheet of notebook paper, retired government meteorologist Andrew Woodcock draws what he calls the worst-case scenario for flooding in the Monadnock Region.
Blue and pink colored-pencil lines mark out a dying cold front over northern New England. Then he adds a tropical storm heading north in green.
If the front holds up the tropical storm, it could dump a lot of rain on the region very quickly, he explains. He dubs the imaginary storm Imelda, and estimates 15 inches of rain in Southwestern New Hampshire.
With serious storms becoming more common and a warming atmosphere able to hold more water than in the past, this isn’t an out-of-left-field scenario. “That’s in the realm of possibility,” he says, tapping the tip of a pencil against the point that represents Keene.
Catastrophic flooding in Central Texas last week raised alarm nationwide about increasingly common extreme weather events, the adequacy of warning systems and recent cuts to the National Weather Service. As of Friday, the death toll was over 120, and rescuers were continuing to search for roughly 170 missing people.
While Monadnock Region residents have not had to contend with the scale of flooding and devastation the Lone Star State suffered last week, they are no strangers to deadly flooding. In 2005, four residents died amid the dangerous rush of Warren Brook and the Cold River crashing through town, three dozen buildings were destroyed and 71 homes were damaged. Though a local historian said 20 years later, the event is no longer at the forefront of residents’ minds.
Flooding is one of the top hazards for the region, with events in 2021 and 2023 leaving several buildings and roads damaged.
Federal, state and local governments have systems in place to prevent and respond to extreme floods, but are those systems sufficient to tackle increasingly common and severe flooding? And what impact could federal changes to those systems have on local response?
The lay of the land
Extreme flooding in the Monadnock Region is different than in Central Texas because of differences in the landscape and water infrastructure, which shape the flood risk here.
“One of the things that works against you is you’re in a bowl,” Woodcock said of Keene.
The city sits at the bottom of a shallow valley at the convergence of 12 rivers and streams. Six major watersheds drain into it, according to the city’s 2018 Hazard Mitigation Plan, and the Ashuelot River is relatively broad and flat through the city, meaning water doesn’t flow out of that bowl very quickly.
Like Keene, many Monadnock Region towns are built along waterways, because access to rivers and streams was important to early settlers.
But with homes and businesses clumped beside water in low-lying valleys, the features that made those towns prime settlements back in the day now also make them prime targets for floods.
By developing roads and homes along river banks, humans have had a hand in creating conditions that could lead to really fast, sudden flooding, said Marilla Harris-Vincent, a New Hampshire river steward with the Connecticut River Conservancy. “The water doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
Harris-Vincent witnessed this situation in Acworth. “They’ve had some really extreme flooding events. And it’s because it’s a very narrow channel that the water just kind of like shoots down through and then it opens up into this man’s farm field,” she said.
Flood resiliency is a common aspect of the conservancy’s restoration work in the Connecticut River watershed, Harris-Vincent said. “Things are so built up these days that there isn’t a place for water to go, and so it’s sort of just funneled down the river channel and then when it gets an opportunity to, like, let out, that’s what happens. And these areas that we’re living in are becoming floodplains now because they’ve been developed and built up.”
Efforts to reduce flooding risk can include adding riparian vegetation, or plants along river banks, that serve as a buffer for overflowing water. “It allows the water to kind of seep into the ground and down into aquifers, instead of going over these, you know, [impervious] surfaces like roads and ... parking lots and that kind of thing, where the water doesn’t have anywhere to go,” she said.
Communities across the country are working to make flood resiliency a part of their comprehensive plans in the wake of more extreme weather events and flooding, Harris-Vincent said. “That, I think, is something that a lot of communities around the nation are doing to encourage the public to be engaged in these local systems. And that’s ... a really significant form of resilience that we’re seeing.”
Those quintessential New England villages, nestled between high hills and low river basins, are particularly susceptible to flooding, Woodcock explains, recalling serious flooding in rural Vermont in 2023 and 2024 that impacted many towns like that.
Since The Sentinel’s conversation with Woodcock, many of those Vermont towns have flooded again.
A volunteer fire department in East Burke said one river rose about five feet in just minutes. While that doesn’t compare to the estimated rise of the Guadalupe during the July 4 floods in Texas, it was enough to overwhelm culverts, brooks and bridges with little to no warning, trapping some residents, damaging roads and bridges and filling homes with water.
It happened just as Woodcock described, with a band of rain dumping a lot of water all at once on small towns along waterways in the bottom of valleys.
That’s the geographic disadvantage the Monadnock Region faces, too. On the other hand, the region has been the site of significant public works projects to mitigate flooding.
Three major flood-control dams operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers help to mitigate flooding on the Ashuelot, Branch and Merrimack rivers in the Monadnock Region. When those rivers rise, rangers close gates at the dams to reduce the flow of water to downstream areas, Christie Baker, project manager for Otter Brook and Surry Mountain Lake, said in an email.
“Our Park Rangers are responsible for the operation and maintenance of each dam and work closely with our team of engineers in the Reservoir Control Center in Concord, Massachusetts to monitor river levels and weather conditions. This dedicated team decides when to close gates to store flood waters,” Baker said.
When conditions improve downstream, the stored water is slowly released so the dam can regain flood storage capacity for the next event.
Since their construction in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the three dams have prevented about $150 million in flood damage, according to the Army Corps.
The city and the Army Corps have also collaborated on flood-control measures along Keene’s Beaver Brook, including the retaining walls that are familiar sights to many East Keene residents.
But flash flooding can still quickly raise small arteries in the region, like the Cold River in northern Cheshire County. And many of the region’s smaller dams, on rivers, brooks and streams, are privately owned or managed by municipalities, and may not be up to the task of holding up under record storms.
At least 26 Cheshire County dams were built before 1900, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Dam Inventory.
Throughout the state, dams built a century or more ago are deteriorating and pose a hazard to the cities and towns that are within their potential floodplains. There are seven state-regulated dams in Cheshire County that are classed as high hazard, meaning their failure would likely result in loss of human life and/or significant property damage, and in poor condition, meaning the dam likely wouldn’t hold up under conditions that could realistically occur.
That’s what created the devastating floods of 2005 in northern Cheshire County. An earthen dam near Lake Warren failed, and several feet of lake water poured into a small stream feeding the Cold River. The resulting wall of water demolished buildings and roads and killed several people.
Since then, the infrastructure failures that led to the flooding have been fixed. Because of this, a future flood won’t be quite the same, Alstead resident and town historical society member Bruce Bellows theorized.
Predicting if something like the recent flooding in Texas could occur in the Connecticut River watershed isn’t a firm yes or no, said Harris-Vincent, of the Connecticut River Conservancy.
“But what you can say is that we are seeing more frequent and intense storm events, especially as a result of climate change,” she said, explaining precipitation is up in New England.
Brave new world
According to hazard mitigation plans and emergency managers from the region, another extreme flooding event could leave the Monadnock Region grappling with severe road wash-outs, stranded towns or neighborhoods, water contamination, delayed or restricted emergency medical services, utility failures and millions of dollars in damage.
And experts say another event like that is becoming more likely.
Flooding like the region saw in 2005, and to a lesser degree in 2021 and 2023 can not only endanger people and infrastructure, but also has long-term consequences for towns and residents.
The risk for the region’s residents isn’t just in the initial event, Gilsum Emergency Management Director Dee Denehy told The Sentinel in April.
When a small town loses a key road or bridge, people can be left stranded without water, medical supplies and other necessities, he said.
Even the smallest towns typically have an emergency manager and hazard mitigation plans in place, but those plans are shaped by what’s happened in the past — something Woodcock said isn’t a great predictor of what could happen in the future, because of the impact of climate change.
“You can’t go on what things were like 50 years ago,” he said.
Harris-Vincent said the region’s seasonal weather patterns are changing.
Instead of snow, rain is coming down in winter. “And then that rain is ... causing runoff, which means that less groundwater is being infiltrated. So instead, it’s just becoming runoff, which is then creating big influxes of water into rivers and storm drains and areas like that that aren’t necessarily equipped to handle like such intense influxes of storms,” she explained.
More winter rain isn’t the only problem; summers have been wetter, too. “We’re seeing these storms happening in the middle of summer, which normally you see high water events when there’s spring runoff, and generally middle of the summer, like July, like what we’ve been seeing the last two years in New England are these extreme floods happening in the middle of the summer, which are normally much drier seasons,” Harris-Vincent said.
More intense and localized storms are also becoming more frequent. “So instead of these rain clouds, you know, moving through an area and dropping rain to an area, they’re kind of just sitting above one area,” she explained. “So it’s like super localized storms, which is just different than I think what we’re used to seeing.”
The city of Keene is in the process of working with FEMA to update its flood maps, which show increasing risk for some parts of downtown and other areas.
The floodplains those maps demarcate are commonly known as the “100 year” and “500 year” plains, but the city’s floodplain administrator Mike Hagan said those names can be misleading, because “100 year” storms can happen more frequently than once in a hundred years — and, more and more often, they are.
Donald Dumont, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service center in Gray, Maine, said rainfall rates and wet conditions going in are the biggest factors for extreme events like the Monadnock Region saw in 2005.
“Obviously the more rain you get in a shorter period of time equals higher run-off rates that leads to higher river and stream levels outside of their banks. This leads to more extreme impacts and loss of life due to the velocity of water movement and rapidly rising water levels,” he said in an email.
Flash flooding like what occurred in Texas happens when waters rise faster than what water basins can hold and what soil can absorb.
That’s most common in this part of the country when heavy rain is coupled with rapid snowmelt or the remnants of a tropical cyclone reaches the region, Dumont said.
For Woodcock, the question isn’t whether extreme flooding will happen again in the near future, but where.
When up to 7 inches of rain fell in a shocking day of storms in northern Vermont last summer, Woodcock notes, which areas got the most rain was mostly a matter of luck. “They were the place picked by Mother Nature to get hit,” he says.
A similar band of rain could threaten flood readiness in any Monadnock Region town.
Alerts
In the wake of the Texas floods, many people, including public officials, raised concerns about cuts to the National Weather Service and questioned whether those cuts could have made the situation worse than it had to be.
There are also questions swirling about the adequacy of the area’s emergency communications infrastructure — a topic that’s also fresh in the Monadnock Region.
Woodcock doesn’t believe blame is helpful at times like these, but he said the cuts to the weather service agency did serious damage to its “collective brain trust.”
He said he knows at least six National Weather Service professionals with 25 years of experience or more who are no longer with the service due to changes made by the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, earlier this year.
“It was a scary time,” Woodcock said. “It was horrible.”
Meteorological forecasting is extremely complex, Woodcock said, not only because of all the different models and tools, but also because of the coordination it takes to manage things during a serious event, when National Weather Service stations have to stay in touch with emergency managers, governments and local media.
“It’s a hard job,” he said. “That’s where the experience comes in handy.”
Woodcock said he’s never written to a senator before, but did so six times in two months when DOGE took aim at the National Weather Service, which he retired from after many years of service in the Washington, D.C., area.
In addition to loss of personnel, Woodcock said possible cuts to the Severe Storms Lab in North Carolina and the National Hurricane Center are worrying.
Dumont, the meteorologist in Gray, Maine, the Monadnock Region’s regional National Weather Service center, said he couldn’t comment on internal staffing.
A March statement from the National Weather Service headquarters in Maryland, however, said weather balloon launches in Gray were being temporarily suspended due to lack of staffing in the weather forecast offices.
Weather balloons are a tool meteorologists use to collect data for weather forecasting.
National Weather Service forecasts are a public service, and meteorologists work hard to be credible and impartial, Woodcock said. They aren’t political, don’t work for a company, and don’t care about clicks or views, he said.
Their work extends from forecasting to communication during events to analysis and verification after. The goal, Woodcock said, is to make sure people have the information they need to stay safe.
“You can’t go on what things were like 50 years ago,” said Dee Denehy, Gilsum Emergency Management Director.
Locally, emergency managers use updates from the National Weather Service to make decisions about how to keep towns safe. They also rely on real-time updates from the U.S. Army Corps about flood-control projects, said Baker, the Otter Brook and Surry Dam project manager.
“We are committed to sharing information about our dams and partnering to support flood-resilient communities across the region,” she wrote. “The emergency managers would make decisions about whether to issue evacuation orders … All direct communications to the public, such as evacuation orders, would be given by the local emergency managers.”
Timeliness of alerts is one piece of the puzzle, but emergency communication infrastructure — how those alerts get to the public — is also important.
According to the Associated Press, a variety of state and local agencies in Texas missed chances to fund new and upgraded warning systems for flash flooding in Kerr County, one of the hardest-hit areas in the July 4 floods.
Unlike in some nearby communities, there was no flood siren near Camp Mystic and other areas along the Guadalupe River where the AP said thousands of youth campers and tourists spend time.
Here in Cheshire County, a more basic form of emergency communications infrastructure has been seeking funding from all available sources.
Southwestern N.H. District Fire Mutual Aid needs about $6 million to replace radio equipment at the 23 antenna sites that enable emergency dispatch for 78 agencies in New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts.
Mutual Aid Chief Coordinator Joe Sangermano said last fall the equipment has an expected lifespan of about 15 years and was last replaced in 2006. He said it’s become difficult to find spare parts for the aging system and the manufacturer no longer services it.
Mutual Aid has resorted to eBay to keep the “piecemeal” system online, according to a September statement from David Bernstein, Cheshire County director of executive services and communications.
