When the River Comes Up: How the Center is Getting Climate Data to Communities at Risk

Jim Sullivan wasn’t sitting at his desk when the calls started coming in. He was already out the door. Culverts were overflowing. Roads were washing out. A 100-foot section of Newark Street had buckled and collapsed. West Burke, Vermont was underwater.

It was July 10, 2025, the third summer in a row that floodwaters had torn through the Northeast Kingdom.

For Burke, it was becoming a grim routine. The same roads washing out, the same neighborhoods flooding, the same scramble to stay ahead of water that moved faster than anyone could plan for. Sullivan had been through it from the beginning. The first of three major floods hit during his first year as town administrator.

“We all heard the rain,” he said. “It was absolutely pounding. It went all the way through the night.”

Kingdom Trails, the mountain bike network that drives much of Burke’s outdoor economy, sustained significant damage across multiple flooding seasons. Two storms in the summer of 2024 caused an estimated $300,000 in trail damage, not counting lost membership revenue, on top of an estimated $150,000 from the prior summer’s flooding.

“If the bikers don’t come up to ride, then my friend Burton, who owns East Burke Market, he doesn’t have anyone pulling in to buy beer and food and gas,” Sullivan said. “He counts on that.”

When the storm hit, Dishmill Brook tore away a third of Burton Hinton’s parking lot. The ground eaten out from underneath it and swallowed by the river. “The insurance doesn’t cover that,” Sullivan said. “He and Kellie had to pay for that themselves and they did because they knew they really didn’t have a choice. But they drew out of their savings to do it. He is really one of the greatest guys I’ve ever met. Kellie is as well. They’re like a salt of the earth family. They’re giving in the community. Those are the last people you want to see get hit.”

Flood damage on Roundy Brook in Burke, Vermont.

Flood damage on Carter Road in Burke, Vermont.

Flood damage on Brook Road in Burke, Vermont.

Northern Forest Center Partnerships Provide Pivotal Climate Data

For Sullivan, the losses added up to something that felt bigger than any one storm. This was a community absorbing blows it had no real tools to prepare for.

That’s where the Northern Forest Center came in. Through a partnership with the Open Space Institute and Yale School of the Environment, the Center brought forward-looking flood modeling data to Burke, as well as Gorham, New Hampshire, and Keene, New York, at no cost to the towns. Through the work of two Yale graduate students, Mia Ambroggio and Clare Scheib-Feeley, each community received a semester’s worth of analysis, identifying vulnerable areas and developing tailored recommendations.

“It confirmed a lot of the things we were thinking,” Sullivan said. “It gave us a really good insight into their recommendations.”

The findings are already being put to work. Burke is in the process of updating its town plan, required every seven years, and Sullivan’s planning commission is combing through the Yale report alongside the town’s natural resource inventory, looking for data to replace figures that date back to 2015.

“We really felt that some of those maps, that verbiage, those data collection numbers, could be used in the town plan,” he said. “Our intention is to update that data with this new information, which I think adds a lot of value to the plan.”

The report has traveled beyond Burke’s borders too. Sullivan shared it with a select board member in neighboring East Haven, VT, whose town faces similar vulnerabilities. “As I read those recommendations, I thought they would find equal value in them,” Sullivan said.

Planning for What’s Coming

Just over fifty miles east, in Gorham, New Hampshire, Phil Cloutier had lived through his own reckoning. On December 18, 2023, a warm rain fell on a heavy snowpack and the rivers came up fast. One house was washed into the rising waters. Another was in the process of going. Low-lying neighborhoods that planners had thought they understood, flooded more severely than anyone had anticipated.

“Vehicles got flushed down rivers, under bridges, and out into other waterways,” said Cloutier, Gorham’s fire chief and emergency management director. “That day we were just running all over town dealing with whatever came our way.”

A river overflowed its banks, crossed the town airport, and inundated a neighborhood in the middle of town. Eight to ten inches of water ran down residential streets.

“Nobody expected that,” Cloutier said. “It’s changed how we think about planning for the unexpected.”

These are not isolated incidents. Across the Northern Forest, communities are grappling with flood events that are growing more frequent, more severe, and less predictable, and doing it largely without the tools they need. The flood maps most towns can access through FEMA are built on historical data. They can tell you what happened, not what’s coming. Forward-looking climate models exist, but they’re expensive, technically complex, and financially out of reach for most small municipalities.

Flooding in Gorham, NH during December 2023 storm.

Overflowing river bed in Gorham, NH during December 2023 storm.

Data That Changes the Equation

The data at the center of that work came from OSI’s Resilient Communities initiative, which maintains a proprietary hub that would otherwise be well beyond the reach of most small towns. Through this collaboration with OSI, and thanks to grant funding from Jane’s Trust and the Vermont Community Foundation, the Center gained access to that hub and shared it directly with community partners.

Yale graduate students Mia Ambroiggio and Clare Scheib-Feeley spent a semester working with officials from all three towns, analyzing risk factors, identifying vulnerable areas, and developing tailored recommendations that ranged from green infrastructure projects and floodplain conservation to zoning changes that would steer future development away from flood-prone areas.

Scheib-Feeley, reflecting on the semester’s work, said the experience reinforced something she hadn’t fully expected going in. “I’m especially grateful that the Center facilitated partnerships with helpful, experienced decision-makers from each town. They shared key community information and stories, provided feedback on our initial analyses, and will adapt final reports to their specific local needs. The project underscored that effective community engagement and place-based solutions are just as important as climate modeling and data analysis.”

For the Town of Gorham, the study built on years of work already underway. “We’ve been really hard at work on the flooding issue for about two and a half years,” Cloutier said. “It kicked into high gear in December 2023.”

What the Yale study offered was a different kind of perspective. “It brought us fresh sets of eyes form people who had no bias about what should happen. They based everything on science and modeling.” Local knowledge shaped the process too. There were places that looked one way on a map but didn’t match reality on the ground, and the team adjusted scope accordingly. “Having outside experts look at it from a different perspective was really valuable,” Cloutier said.

The study also surfaced resources the town hadn’t fully tapped and opened up new thinking on funding, identifying options and creative approaches to a challenge Cloutier describes plainly: “We know something needs to be done. It’s finding the money to do it.”

“Working with Mike Morin has been really helpful,” Cloutier said. “Anytime you can bring in people with a broader reach, it opens doors you didn’t know existed. We wouldn’t have been involved with the Yale/OSI study at all if it weren’t for the Center.”

Cloutier also noted something beyond the immediate project. “The two students who did the work could be the engineers and planners helping us fix this problem ten years from now. Getting future leaders involved is important too.”

A Risk No Town Should Face Alone

In Keene, New York, the geography tells the story. The town sits in an Adirondack valley surrounded by some of the highest mountains east of the Rockies. Its housing, businesses, and critical infrastructure are clustered along a steep river corridor carved by the Ausable River. When heavy rain falls on those mountains, the water has nowhere to go but down.

In December 2024, that’s exactly what happened. The Ausable swelled beyond its banks, swamping roads, flooding homes, and damaging Marcy Field. Routes 73 and 9N, the main arteries in and out of Keene Valley, were knocked out, cutting residents off from grocery stores and threatening the tourism economy that depends on that corridor. A local hardware store pumped water out before it reached the furnace. The town had done significant flood mitigation work in the years since Tropical Storm Irene, which prevented worse damage, but the vulnerability was plain.

What the community lacked, until now, was the data to plan around it.

“Climate resiliency is a priority for the Town of Keene,” said Town Supervisor Joe Pete Wilson. “Our small town lacks the technical capacity to conduct the research, mapping, and analysis required to plan appropriate solutions.”

The Northern Forest Center’s partnership offered something Keene couldn’t have accessed on its own. “The Center offered its highly skilled staff and students to survey potential flood plan acquisitions using the latest cutting-edge maps and climate data,” Wilson said. “The report the Center team delivered to the Town will provide foundational data for our ongoing strategic planning process. Without partners like the Northern Forest Center, the Town of Keene could not afford the sophisticated data and recommendations necessary for the effective planning and preparation.”

The Center continues to pursue climate readiness work across the four-state region, building on partnerships to help communities navigate a challenge that isn’t going away.

For Cloutier, the urgency is personal. He’s lived in Gorham for more than twenty years, in neighboring Berlin his whole life before that, and had never seen flooding at this scale until 2023.

“People forget quickly,” he said. “Keeping this in the forefront takes real effort. The big lesson is something I’ve seen with utilities: it’s easy to plan for a blue sky day when the weather is fine. But you have to spend the good days planning for the bad ones. Don’t wait for the next flood and then say, ‘We should have done something sooner.’”