Flooding from around Vermont In Montpelier, stranded motorists, worried shop owners

BY ERIN PETENKO AND FRED THYS

VTDigger

As the floodwaters slowly receded from State Street on Tuesday, the roof of a car parked in the middle of an intersection was just barely visible. The car’s owners stood on higher ground nearby. They had hatched a plan to walk to Stowe, a roughly 15-mile hike through the mountains.

Melissa Marcoux, one part of the pair, said they were coming back from New Hampshire on Monday when detour signs started popping up along their route. When they reached State Street, the floodwater “just kind of came out of nowhere,” she said.

They had to crawl out of their car window in order to escape.

“Don’t worry, I locked it,” she noted wryly.

Countless other people stuck in Vermont’s capital, home to some

8,000 people, had their own tales to tell on Tuesday about navigating the storm, from braving torrential rains on Monday to traversing its deluged streets the morning after, when much of the downtown’s firstfloor homes and businesses were submerged.

An emergency order closed the area for much of the day and amid surreal scenes of so-called “kayak fairies” paddling the city’s streets to assist strangers in need. Thousands worried about the Wrightsville Dam on the North Branch of the Winooski River, where floodwaters threatened to breach the dam for the first time in its nearly 90-year history. Small business owners suffered devastating damage to their storefronts. And at least a half-dozen households, including one made up of two adults and an infant, needed emergency rescue.

In the case of Marcoux and her