PLAINFIELD, Vt.—Eli Barlow loved his home in the Heartbreak Hotel.
His back porch sat above the water and held memories of dinners and parties, talking with friends under the golden haze of Christmas lights that hung year round. At night he would fall asleep lulled by the sound of the Great Brook flowing underneath his open bedroom windows and in the morning, he’d eat breakfast on the front porch. It was from there that he would keep an eye on his neighbor’s kids or watch dog owners walking past on their way to the nearby recreation fields.
Because of the way Plainfield has been built—perched on the banks between the Winooski River and the Great Brook—it is no stranger to floods. Water has been both a source of wealth and a force of destruction ever since the town was founded in 1797. Many of the quiet buildings that form its downtown sit along the river, even though the mills they were built around are long gone.
The Heartbreak Hotel was one of these buildings. Dating back to the late 1800s, it became housing for mill workers in 1912. The down-on-their-luck nature of these early “Heartbreakers” lent the apartment building its nickname, but in the following century it grew into an iconic fixture of the community, where people were known to pass through before buying houses in town. The historic structure has been added to and redesigned throughout the years, and despite having “heartbreak” in its name, residents who lived in its vintage apartments knew it as a loving place.
It was a rare find in Vermont: eight affordable rental housing units that came with a lively community and access to nature.
Now, it is gone, washed away by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Vermont is reeling from three consecutive floods in three years that have left the state searching for infrastructure solutions. The loss of the Heartbreak Hotel in Plainfield is just one example of how river towns are finding themselves at the forefront of the climate crisis, as new weather patterns make homes unlivable and further erode stability during a statewide housing crisis.
Despite these challenges, communities are turning to creative solutions by organizing volunteer efforts to create a more sustainable future for those who can’t imagine living anywhere else.
Before the storm, Barlow remembered how neighbors’ cats would cross the Great Brook under the old mill housing complex, keeping their paws dry by jumping from stone to stone. Eastern phoebes would fly low in search of bugs over the shallows, and Barlow would wade in after work, cooling off in the privacy of tree-lined banks.
When winter came, a Christmas tree tucked in the corner of the Heartbreak’s front porch accompanied the year-round lights—their glow reflected in icicles that hung in thick sheets from the snow-covered roof. In those days if anyone needed help clearing snow off their car, they could count on their neighbors.
An artist who makes jewelry, Barlow loved the retrofitted feel of the apartments. “Ours was awesome; it had a weird pantry and a weird kitchen sink,” he said. “It was gorgeous.”
Something about the apartment felt stable, and he had a sense that he and his neighbors in the building were planning to live there for a while, Barlow said—until it turned to chaos.
A Bloated, Angry River
On July 10, 2024, Hurricane Beryl, which hit Matagorda, Texas, two days earlier as a Category 1 hurricane, made its way as a post-tropical storm over Vermont and dumped up to 7 inches of rain across the northern half of the state. After the storm had passed through Plainfield, it left behind around $10 million in damages, which the town with a budget of $1.3 million is struggling to contend with a year later.
“The water came around and into the house, and then all hell broke loose,” said Jim Clark, sitting on a white chair in front of his brick house that overlooks the barren yard where the Heartbreak Hotel used to be. In 60 years he had never seen the river flood as it did last July.
A green plaque on the side of his house announces it was built decades before the Heartbreak, in 1840, and thanks to the hill it’s on, has never flooded. This was the yard that residents evacuated to, the night that the power of the water tore down the Heartbreak Hotel and washed it away.
Barlow saw the bloated, angry river washing up against the side of the building that day and started to feel panicked. After moving skis and gear out of the basement in case water came in, he grabbed his computer and some clothes, not thinking to take his passport. Worst case, he thought, he would have to find a place to crash for the week.
It wasn’t until later that night that Barlow realized that he would never see his home or any of his belongings again.
Gathered on the hill with the rest of the Heartbreakers in the dark, it was hard to make out exactly what happened through the downpour. Water was rushing down the street at the bottom of the neighbor’s yard, and at one point Barlow remembers someone waded across it to get back into the Heartbreak.
An older resident had forgotten her meds inside, and another neighbor went back in for her. Barlow thought, “If he falls down he’s gonna die, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” While he made it out safe and no lives were lost that night, 42 people in town lost their homes.
A Hard Reality
Over the next months, property owners worked with local and state officials to apply for the FEMA buyout program. Submitted in October, they hope the program will compensate owners for their property, and turn the empty lots into floodplains.
The buyouts are the last resort for those who lost everything, and are only considered if there is proof that rebuilding the houses would lose money because they would keep flooding in the future. It’s a hard reality for the town to face, as the value of these houses would be permanently erased from the tax base.
This is the plan for the Heartbreak Hotel and 26 other buildings in Plainfield, but progress is running behind schedule, according to the town’s buyout coordinator and owner of the Heartbreak Hotel, Arion Thiboumery.
In April, the Office of Management and Budget, which advises the president, made two changes for determining cost effectiveness for buyouts that made it so the majority of Plainfield’s applications had to be re-packaged and re-submitted. This comes alongside major cuts to FEMA—in May, Reuters reported a third of the staff had been terminated or resigned.
As of Aug. 1, Vermont has received awards for 149 buyouts out of 264 applications submitted in 2023 and 2024.
The buyouts would hurt the town’s real estate tax base, a problem the nearby city of Barre decided it couldn’t afford and prevented by refusing to sign off on some applications. The attitude now in Plainfield is that there isn’t much of a choice.
These past two years made it clear that either the town gives the river the space it needs to overflow, or the river will take this land by force. The only thing that remains uncertain is when it might flood next.
Along with houses, the flood washed out roads and bridges that the town has yet to rebuild a year later. This includes the concrete bridge that crossed the Great Brook directly in front of the Heartbreak Hotel; built in 1928, it had weathered a century of storms, until the river tore it from the ground.
The force needed to do this came from hundreds of uprooted trees, along with debris from landslides upstream, that slammed into the bridge that night, building pressure.
When the structure finally burst, concrete, wood and boulders smashed downstream into the basement wall of the Heartbreak, taking the foundation out from underneath the building and tearing the apartments off with it.
“We heard this sound,” Clark, on his porch, clapped his hands to demonstrate the crashing noise, “…the collapse of that building, and a guy goes: ‘I just lost my two cats.’”
Standing there in Clark’s yard, Barlow saw the light coming from his neighbor’s house on the other side of the river that was once obscured by his apartment and knew everything was gone.
His home with all his belongings inside resurfaced farther down the river, mostly in piles of rubble that cleanup crews in the following days dragged out of the water and into dumpsters, never to be seen again.
In the early weeks after the storm, Barlow would scavenge with friends and one day they came across the first wooden chair he had ever made, buried in the mud but in one piece.
Also a woodworker, Barlow noticed the unique bright yellow front doors of the Heartbreak Hotel when he stepped through them for the first time in 2021.
Four years later and the doors are in storage. Their empty frames are all that remain on the face of the building, along with proud bay windows that still overlook the river and a temporary bridge out front. They’re a ghost of this landmark that had stood watch over the town for more than a century, and a warning to passersby of a changing climate.
First in Disasters
The abandoned sights in Plainfield are the state’s starkest example of the challenges it is facing in how to adapt to its rivers in a new era of flooding. Vermont is hilly, with rivers cutting channels through mountains; the towns along the rivers—gritty, tight-knit communities—have lined these waterways with houses and roads in valleys that act like bowls, filling with water after intense storms.
A 2023 study from Dartmouth found that extreme weather events in the northeast are forecasted to increase 52 percent by the end of the century. These are rainfalls that towns across the state are painfully aware of and concerned about how to become better equipped to handle.
The forecast already has proof of being true, as Vermont is now one of the top 10 states in declaring federal disasters from extreme weather, despite being one of the smallest and least populated. A February study from Rebuild by Design shows that Washington County, Vermont—which includes Plainfield, Barre and the state’s capital, Montpelier—has the highest number of disasters of any county nationwide.
When Thiboumery bought the Heartbreak Hotel in 2021, he expected floods and was ready to shovel sediment every so often. In 2023, he thought, “OK, you know, climate change is happening. The 100-year flood is now the 10-year flood,” clearing out the basement to prepare.
The building was inundated that year, during a 100-year flood that caused a state Emergency Declaration and a billion dollars worth of damage. Down the road in Montpelier, several feet of water filled the downtown area and people were seen canoeing in the streets. It was the worst flood Vermont residents expected to see in a lifetime.
On July 10th, 2024, when a weather alert popped up and the Great Brook started to rise again, Thiboumery was cynical that other people were overreacting because of the uncanny timing. “Like, oh boy, everybody’s saying it’s gonna be a big deal on the exact same day,” Thiboumery said. “But lo and behold, it was much worse.”
“That was really more of an alarm call for me,” he said. “That was like—excuse me, but holy shit—the world is a fundamentally different world.”
Looking at the eyesore of what’s left of his investment, Thiboumery now hopes that the last third of the building behind what’s left of its facade can be destroyed too, so that the land can be turned into a park. But while the buyout application is underway, he’s unable to clean up the site.
There’s a gaping hole near where the building used to connect to the rear stretch of apartments and porches. Through this hole, those who drive past on the temporary bridge can see directly into the cross section of ruined kitchens that are frozen in time from last year.
On the first floor, a child’s Bulbasaur Pokémon sticker clings to an agape cabinet door. Peeling slightly, it has somehow withstood a full year exposed to the elements of harsh New England seasons. Underneath it, jars of organic spices are strewn across the wide, original floorboards, and a blue paw printed bowl peeks out from under a chunk of fallen ceiling.
Across the dust-filled hall, a colorful piece of paper is still taped up to the door of the neighbor’s apartment. It shows a child holding bright popsicles, advertising “$3 a pop!” written in red pen. Now, the only visitor wandering through the building’s empty back door frame is a large raccoon who’s made a living out of the destroyed, but stocked kitchens within.
Still Recovering
The Heartbreak wasn’t the only apartment building that was ruined. One road over, a white clapboard building’s windows are dark, and its porch sags on ground. Lauren Geiger lives in the brick house next to it with her husband, who built their house in 2003 while living with his three sons across the river at the Heartbreak.
“It’s depressing to live in the village and be looking out at buildings that you know are empty, or where your friends used to live and you know that they’re not going to be inhabitable again,” she said, looking across her yard at the old apartments.
This story is funded by readers like you.
Our nonprofit newsroom provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. Please donate now to support our work.
Gieger was on the third floor of her house last July when she heard the crash of their basement window shattering. When she ran down to see what happened, she realized that had she been in the room at the time, she would be dead.
A pool table was thrown across the room into a wall as the brook rushed in, and when the water finally receded, it left behind thick mud and plants stuck to her ceiling. She found one of her propane tanks floating in the river.
She worries what will happen the next time the river floods. “I’m not replacing my sofas. Let’s put it that way,” she said. Her perennials out front this year are clippings she’s pieced together from neighbors, to avoid buying new plants for a garden that will wash away again.
While her home still hasn’t been fully renovated, she worries for the rest of the town. “It’s bad enough to have the houses sitting there empty, but to also have the debris sitting around? It’s just demoralizing,” she said. Driving through, it seems that most streets are marked by buyout sites.
These are valuable properties in the midst of a severe statewide housing crisis. Homelessness in Vermont has increased 312 percent from 2020-2024, and the houses that were lost to storms compound the state’s need to build more than 24,000 new units in the next five years to meet the demand of the market.
A two-minute drive from Gieger’s house, just the outline of a concrete pit remains where 270 Brook Road used to be—its red roof once a shock of color among tall pines. The woman living there the night of the storm was pulled out of a window by rescuers at the last minute before the house was swept away.
“That was probably the closest that we came to loss of life in the village,” Geiger recalled.
Today, all that’s left of the house are stairs to a second floor that only exists in memory and a pit where the foundation was. A painted board blocks off the steps. With sunflowers and a peace sign peeking through unkempt grass, it announces: “Welcome to the staircase to nowhere now; please turn around and go home…”
“Unintended Community”
Finding a home this past year has been a complicated process for Barlow and others whose homes disappeared overnight. There would have never been a better time to move to another state but the community in central Vermont kept Barlow rooted to Plainfield, despite the absence of a house.
He’s grateful for the “unintended community” of the Heartbreak Hotel, which has held strong in the past year. The tenants helped each other navigate the FEMA renter’s paperwork—a process in which Barlow was reimbursed $1,500 for necessities out of the $30,000 of belongings he lost.
“It was weird and bureaucratic and also disorganized. And, awkward—real awkward,” he said of the federal application, which took months to process.
Local support stepped in when FEMA fell short. Friends were quick to set up GoFundMe pages for those in town who were flooded, which brought in notes of encouragement and donations that exceeded their goals.
For Barlow and his housemates, this was enough for them to buy new furniture and find another apartment to rent after living week to week between friends’ houses. “We tried to make a list of people to thank directly, and it was in the low hundreds,” he said.
The town’s recovery efforts were supported by outside groups, too. Geiger recalls among them a Mennonite Disaster Service, the Rainbow Brigade of Barre and CrossFitters who towed the 400-pound wood stove out of her basement.
“In these moments, you just help out your neighbor,” Barlow said, referencing how he and his housemates had joined the efforts after the 2023 floods, when the local attitude was to help neighbors despite prejudices and political differences. “Regardless,” he said, “I’m still gonna come help clean up your shit if it’s in the river.”
“You have to help out in a way that’s sustainable year to year, not just week to week or day to day.”
— Eli Barlow
He’s lived his whole life in Vermont and it’s the combination of people who look out for each other and the sense of closeness that runs in the state’s river valleys that make them feel like home.
“When I’m driving through Kansas, or even into Colorado or New Mexico, I get a sense of agoraphobia. I definitely get like, ‘Oh, this is too much space.’ I need there to be trees and valleys and hills,” he said.
But despite these trees and valleys proving to be a recipe for disaster in a warmer, wetter climate, Barlow feels a duty to stay and give back to the town after it took care of him.
Last summer, the scale of the long-term climate adaptation that central Vermont needed sunk in. “I had this really deep moment of exhaustion and realization that this is the long haul,” he said. “You have to help out in a way that’s sustainable year to year, not just week to week or day to day.”
This was Thiboumery’s goal when he spearheaded efforts for a new town committee to look into developing a 24-acre field on higher ground to turn into affordable and climate resilient housing plots last year.
The idea gained support a month after the flood, and in March, 11 volunteer members were appointed by the town’s Select Board to make the project a reality. Geiger oversees communications, while Barlow has been working on gauging interest with town-wide surveys.
The East Village Expansion Advisory Committee hopes to create new housing opportunities for those displaced by floods, and others who might want to live in Plainfield but can’t because of the difficult housing market. If they succeed, their efforts would be an example of how towns across the state might be able to relocate to safer ground, at a time when homes in historically settled floodplains have become unsustainable, and in some cases, unlivable.
“The world has changed, whether we like it or not, and we have to acknowledge that there are things that are far more powerful than we are,” Thiboumery said. “The only thing we can do in the face of this, other than simply being victims and giving up, is to adapt.”
“Lost in Time”
On July 11, Renée Cohen and her husband, Adam, passed through Plainfield after coming to town for a concert on the campus of Goddard College, which closed its doors last year. They slowed to a stop in front of the remains of the Heartbreak Hotel.
“It’s like it’s lost in time,” said Adam, reflecting on the town as he peered at the Heartbreak’s dark windows and empty doorways. A thick layer of river silt filled the entryway and beyond the windows, a living room was littered with toys and board games, all coated in dust and tracks of raccoon paws.
The Heartbreak was one of many destroyed structures, decorated with piles of silt and abandoned daylilies, that cast an eerie presence in the otherwise vibrant town. Overflowing gardens, hearts in people’s windows and signs spelling “love” or announcing the weekly farmers’ market hinted at the usual livelihood of the small village.
Farther down the road, broken bridges stitched together the banks of the brook, and in between them, the erosion of the valley was dramatic, with entire hillsides carved out by landslides in places where the forests, rocks and dirt had surrendered to the will of the water a year ago.
“We’re looking at the result of some sort of climate change,” said Adam, who’s lived in Vermont since 1989. “The rivers are far more volatile than they’ve ever been.”
The couple didn’t know the exact science behind the flood, and they had never met the renters who had once lived in the Heartbreak’s apartments. Even so, it was clear there was a story behind the ruins.
“Where are these people?” he asked, looking out the passenger window of his Subaru Outback. “These people have lives. They have livelihoods, and we owe it to them to not let them just hang.”
“If we just let them fend for themselves in unimaginable circumstances, we have failed,” he said.
Then he started up the engine and a few minutes later the car was gone, stirring dust up from the gravel road as it disappeared around the corner.
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
Fellow
Nina Sablan is a junior at Swarthmore College, majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Peace and Conflict Studies in the Honors Program. Living in Vermont, she is interested in the intersection of policy and environmental justice, and the impact of local news. Prior to ICN she was an intern for Seven Days, and her work has appeared in Daybreak Upper Valley and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Great Job By Nina Sablan & the Team @ Inside Climate News Source link for sharing this story.
