(Host) Disasters occur when a sudden shocking event takes lives and destroys property. Tragedies occur when disasters are made worse by human error.
There were some of both in the past year, but as Steve Delaney reports in this section of our year in review, the year’s leading tragedy was so intense that its ripples were felt half a continent away.
(Delaney) At the end of August the almost perfect storm found the almost perfect target, a city below sea level. When Katrina hit New Orleans, everybody watched, and everybody was moved, especially when a nine year old boy in the squalid Superdome looked into a network TV camera and said, We need some help here.
Vermonters were already moving to provide that help. The state set up collection centers, and they were swamped. One site was the state police barracks in Rockingham,
(Collection worker) “It’s really great to be part of effort like this like this. I just couldn’t imagine losing my entire city. I couldn’t imagine it.”
(Delaney) Vermont sent more than thirty truckloads of spontaneously donated relief supplies in the first convoy, and almost as much in the second.
VPR listeners donated more than $400,000 for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund in response to a one-day appeal for help. And people went from Vermont too, lots of them. They were ambulance crews, and utility workers and undertakers and firemen, and just plain folks with an urge to help.
David Cote of the Health Department remembers when the call for medics went out.
(Cote) “We’ve had a terrific response from the physicians and nurses, respiratory therapists and epidemiologists in the state of Vermont. We’ve had over a hundred people volunteer since Friday morning.”
(Delaney) VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb kept in touch with some of those volunteers by phone.
(Wertlieb) The Katrina story made a real impression on me from a Vermont perspective even before I spoke to anyone about it. Early reports had Vermont relief workers heading down to the Gulf region before the storm hit. And I thought that was extraordinary. It was clear that Vermonters were serious about helping out and doing so quickly.
(Delaney) It wasn’t just Katrina. Rita and Wilma followed, and close to home, the floods of October. It rained hard in southern Vermont and New Hampshire. There was some flooding in Brattleboro and in Keene.
But nowhere did it get as bad as in Alstead, New Hampshire, where four people died and more than forty buildings were washed away in a sudden ten-inch downpour.
Barbara Porter watched the cleanup and recalled the destruction.
(Porter) “Our neighbor at the foot of the hill, his house is gone. I work at the Villa school, and we have school children, their houses and trailers and so on just were swept right away.”
(Delaney) Alstead, Like New Orleans, is not the place it was before the water came. And when it receded, Alstead residents were echoing the same questions being asked on the Gulf Coast. Where is FEMA, and why aren’t they doing anything?
VPR’s Steve Zind covered the Alstead flooding.
(Zind) When I visited the morning after the flood, there was a surprising calm about the whole scene. People were just going about their business, which on that day was the business of helping out those who had lost property or in the worst cases loved ones in the flood. I know it seems like one of those clich s about small town New England life, but you really got the sense that people were pulling together and taking care of each other.
(Delaney) In March the last flu season ended after a near-panic over a shortage of flu vaccine. In fact, by the end of the season, there was plenty.
In early October 48 elderly tourists from Michigan boarded an excursion boat on Lake George, in New York. Within an hour twenty of them were dead after the boat capsized in essentially calm water.
76 year-old Jean Siler of Trenton Michigan survived.
(Siler) “All my friends around me, some of them not being able to swim, were fumbling about. Some of them were screaming. And those that could were trying to hang on to the sides of the boat.”
(Delaney) Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board moved in and began their methodical work.
They focused on design modifications made after the boat was certified, and on whether there were simply too many people aboard.
At year’s end they’re still pulling together what happened on Lake George, and why. Susan Keese covered that story for VPR, and she recalls that the sinking affected the village as well as the vacationers.
(Keese) The thing that struck me was the sadness the rescuers felt over all the people they weren’t able to revive… and the feeling that this wasn’t supposed to happen on this beautiful lake where people take the business of welcoming visitors very seriously.
(Delaney) The year began with a shock in Burlington. A young man died of carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment complex near UVM. His fianc e and several other residents were gravely injured. Investigators found a flawed vent system in the building’s furnace, and took corrective action. So did the Legislature, which quickly made it mandatory for all inhabited buildings to have carbon monoxide detectors.
For VPR News, I’m Steve Delaney.