Floodwaters From Storm Isolate 11 Vermont Towns
 Vyto Starinskas/The Daily Herald, via Associated Press
Road crews evaluate the flood damage to Route 4 in Mendon, Vt. on Monday. Many towns in the state have been cut off by roads washed out after Hurricane Irene.
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and THOMAS KAPLAN Published: August 30, 2011
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Eleven small towns in Vermont remained cut off on Tuesday due to flooded roads and bridges, and emergency workers here and in upstate New York readied for another day of rescue and recovery in the wake of Hurricane Irene’s torrential rains.
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A convoy of trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency was to arrive in Vermont shortly after daybreak, bringing food, water and other supplies for at least seven hard-hit towns. The agency planned to use helicopters to deliver the supplies to cut-off residents, according to Vermont Emergency Management.
More than 250 roads and 30 state bridges in Vermont remained fully or partly closed from the flooding, which could start again in some spots as larger rivers, like the Connecticut, continued to rise.
In some communities of the Catskills and other rural areas of New York, electrical workers, limited on Monday by floodwaters that were still rising, hoped to gain access for the first time to downed power lines and other damaged infrastructure. A long stretch of the New York State Thruway remained closed for the morning commute due to flooding.
In Albany, aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo planned to draft a request to President Obama for additional federal assistance. And across the Northeast, millions of people awoke to battery-powered alarm clocks and darkened homes. By late Monday night, the Long Island Power Authority, which was hit hard by the storm, had managed to restore power to only 198,000 of its 523,000 customers who had lost electricity in the storm.
By sunrise on Tuesday, power had been restored to more than a quarter of the 796,000 customers in New York State who lacked electricity as of dinner time on Monday night. Still, more than half a million customers remained without power, and the state’s utilities offered few promises about the speed of their repairs.
Some areas of upstate New York might have extended blackouts lasting into next week, said Howard B. Glaser, director of state operations for the Cuomo administration.
“It’s not safe to go into some of these areas,” Mr. Glaser said.
While most eyes warily watched the shoreline during Hurricane Irene’s grinding ride up the East Coast, it was inland — sometimes hundreds of miles inland — where the most serious damage actually occurred. And the major culprit was not wind, but water.
As blue skies and temperate breezes returned on Monday, a clearer picture of the storm’s devastation emerged, with the gravest consequences stemming from river flooding in Vermont and upstate New York.
In the New York City area, life continued its steady return to normal on Tuesday morning. The subway system, a day removed from an unprecedented storm-induced hibernation, hummed like any other morning. The Metro-North Railroad resumed regular weekday service on its heavily traveled Hudson and New Haven lines, and the lower portion of its Harlem line; an hour into the morning commute, the railroad reported good service. New Jersey Transit also planned to restore much of its commuter-rail service on Tuesday.
On Monday, Mr. Cuomo led a helicopter tour of suffering towns, seeing submerged cars, ruined crops and washed out roads. In tiny, hard-hit Prattsville, what looked like a jumble of homes lay across a roadway, as if they had been tossed like Lego pieces.
“We were very lucky in the city, not quite as lucky on Long Island, but we were lucky on Long Island,” Mr. Cuomo said. “But Catskills, mid-Hudson, this is a different story and we paid a terrible price here, and many of these communities are communities that could least afford to pay this kind of price. So the state has its hands full.”
In Vermont, officials recovered the body of a man who was tending the municipal water system in Rutland during the storm. They said his son, who was with him at the time, was also feared dead. A 21-year-old woman died after being swept into the Deerfield River in Wilmington, a small town west of Brattleboro. And a man was found dead in Ludlow. “This is a really tough battle for us,” Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont said after surveying the damage across the state in a helicopter. “What you see is farms destroyed, crops destroyed, businesses underwater, houses eroded or swept away and widespread devastation.”
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