Photo credit: Civil Air Patrol

Riverside Mobile Home Park sits on a bend in the Ottauquechee River just upstream from Woodstock Union High School & Middle School. The park flooded in 2011 during Tropical Storm Irene, and again in the summer of 2023. In Vermont, about one-third of mobile home communities are at least partially in federal floodplains. This is true of Riverside as well;a large portion of Riverside is in a FEMA flood hazard zone, which means that residents are at risk of being flooded in the future.

This past year, Sustainable Woodstock joined forces with Two Rivers Ottauquechee Regional Planning Commission (TRORC), the HUB, Regional Care Coordinator Carla Kamel, and the Vermont Department of Conservation’s Watershed Planner for our region. We hosted a meeting with Riverside residents in August to hear their concerns and share ways we could help. A group that residents have dubbed the “Riverside Emergency Preparedness Alliance” came out of that meeting. This group is creating an emergency flood safety plan made by and for Riverside residents. The Vermont Department of Health is helping us to create and write this plan, which we hope to have completed by spring.

We have also applied for a $210,000 Community Development Block Grant–Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) planning grant to study Riverside Mobile Home Park. Funded by HUD and made available to Vermont counties affected by the 2023 floods, this program focuses on housing and flood recovery. Our grant proposal would fund a detailed engineering study, building on a preliminary analysis already completed at Riverside. The study will explore design alternatives to reduce flood heights and prevent future damage to homes and infrastructure at Riverside. Engineers will create a two-dimensional model of the river channel, offering a more precise understanding of where floodplain restoration could lower flood heights.

This grant will also include a real estate and civil engineering study, which will identify suitable parcels for relocating the most at-risk mobile homes at the park. We do not know yet what the engineering portion of the study will recommend, but it is possible that the recommended project could involve moving some homes. The purpose of this part of the grant is to make sure that the people in those homes would have somewhere else to go. To this end, the study will identify, rank, and prioritize up to 5 potential relocation sites for approximately 8-12 mobile homes (there are currently 39 homes at the park). Many thanks to Planner Kyle Katz with Two Rivers Ottauquechee Regional Planning Commission for his assistance with this grant.

There are still many unknowns about the path forward at Riverside, but we look forward to working with our community partners and residents to learn what is possible.