BURKE, Vt. (WCAX) – Small towns in the Northeast Kingdom are in beginning stages of recovery.
“I drove down part of my driveway and it looked like a river. It was flowing like you wouldn’t believe,” Burke resident George Frank said.
George Frank has lived in Burke for the last forty years, and this is the second time the July floods washed out his driveway.
He says he’s trying to dig out a new driveway to avoid it being flooded again.
But for now all he can do is keep working.
“It does cost a lot of money and its a lot of anguish. Takes a lot of time to put things back together again. It’s hard work, but. It keeps your mind on what you’re doing,” Frank said.
And frank is not the only one trying to put things back together.
Along with the town of Burke, the town of Lyndon got hit hard as well, and business owners have been working around the clock all weekend to get things repaired.
Janet Gray Burnor, from Miss Lyndonville Diner says it could take two weeks for everything to dry off.
“As far as the way they are approaching the clean up, we are starting from under the building and going up. How long it will take to get this done is completely unknown. You know, we’re figuring it out as we go,” Burnor said.
Burke Town Administrator Jim Sullivan says, this time around, the town was met with more landslides, and broken bridges because of the flood.
And he fears how much money his town, and others, will spend on recovery.
“This was a different storm. The damage that took place last year was a lot of material and culverts. This year it’s really bigger things. I do have a fear that this storm is going to cost us more than the storm that we went through last year,” Sullivan said.
People living in the hard hit spots say they will continue to clean up into the week.