COVENTRY — Kathy Holbrook, owner of Martha’s Diner along Route 5, wryly recalled Wednesday how relieved she had been after looking in on her family business on Monday evening. The Black River was high then, but no higher than she saw during the regular spring snow melt.
When she returned early Tuesday morning to check again, however, the parking lot was covered by muddy water and the diner surrounded. Her basement, full of the building’s mechanical systems and boxes of soda syrup, was full up past her waist. She said the flooding was like nothing she or her parents had ever seen since they purchased the Northeast Kingdom staple in 1985.
“A lot of boxes and other things were floating,” Holbrook said Wednesday afternoon as she and her husband, Bill, took stock of the situation with several other helpers. “I was really hoping to be able to reopen tomorrow, but now I don’t know.”
The Holbrooks were among many property owners and residents along the Black River in the village of Coventry who were starting to pump out basements, clean up soggy flooring and assess the damage on Wednesday.
In the village, Main Street parallels the river and crosses it twice, once to the south of the main residential area and once to the north. The entire length of road closest to the river was underwater during the storm this week, according to Town Administrator Matt Maxwell.
On Wednesday afternoon, the southern river crossing was open, as it had remained throughout. But there was still a large pond between Martha’s Diner and the village center where the northern entrance should have been.
Route 5 north of the village also continued to be closed due to standing water. That is the main route for trucks across the state heading to the state’s only active landfill, run by Casella Waste Systems. While the road remains closed, both the towns of Coventry and Irasburg have given temporary permission for that traffic to run along parallel back roads, Maxwell said.
Though there were some isolated washouts on the outskirts, the most damage was concentrated in the village center, Maxwell said, unlike other towns such as Hardwick where as much as 70 percent of the dirt roads were impassable in the immediate aftermath. “We were luckier than most towns because we have a lot of paved roads,” he said.
The Coventry Community Center, which houses the town offices as well as a large meeting space, is open to the public as a daytime shelter, as needed. While drinking water remained potable in the village, several houses were having trouble with their septic systems. Meals were served Tuesday to around 15 to 20 people, Maxwell said.
A seven-unit building of rentals at the northern corner was among the hardest hit. Outside, Marie Chapman of Derby was putting on rubber coveralls to help her son and daughter-in-law begin to remove what was salvageable from their first floor apartment. Around the corner, another group was ripping out a wooden floor.
Second-floor renters Anna and Jeremy Lucas described exiting their apartment Monday night through knee-high water to take shelter with a relative who lived across the street.
Several people spoke about the help they had already received from neighbors. For Holbrook, it was advice and a steadying presence from a local flood recovery business owner. For Chapman, it was the offers of cleanup gear and replacement materials.
“It amazes me,” Chapman said. “We’re such a financially poor community, but we are there for our fellow man when need be.”
