Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: 50 eight. H seven 78. Thanks. We are live.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify. For the record, my name is Ben Green. I'm the section chief of the Department of Environmental Conservation Dam Safety Program. I'm here to talk about Dam Failure Emergency Operation Planning and H778. I'm joined by my colleague Sarah Moore, also from the Dam Safety Program. She was heavily involved in the development of the participation in the committee, attended all the meetings, was involved in the report, legislative report preparations for CTR for support. I'll just provide a brief presentation overview. I was hoping just to provide a brief overview of our program and then review Act 121, the establishment of the Emergency Operations Planning Committee and review some of the work that we did in the final report and then discuss seven seventy eight. Just a brief overview on the Dam Safety Program. We're located in the water investment division within DEC. Our mission statement is listed here. It's just a little bit different than many other programs in DEC and that our primary objective is to protect the public and public safety relative to dams. In order to do that, we have two primary responsibilities. Number one is dam regulation. We regulate non hydropower, non federal dams in the state. And then we also are dam owners and we directly own 14 state owned dams, including the three Windsor Flood control dams. Both those tasks take about 50% of our time. Current staffing is at seven. We have a team of engineers and a technician. We have a program administrator, which is Sarah. And right now we have two positions that we're trying to fill, a project budget manager and an additional engineer. On the regulatory side, as I mentioned, we regulate non federal, non power dams, meaning that if there's hydropower at the dam, we likely do not regulate that. And we operate under 10 VSA Chapter 43 dams. The entire inventory of dams we regulate is around a thousand. We more heavily regulate a little over 400 of those thousand. On the ownership side, as I mentioned, we own 14 dams, including the three Winders River flood control dams, are Waterbury, Wrightsville, and East Ferry. In addition to those, we also do assist our sister departments when able, fish and wildlife and forest parks and recreation with their dams. As part of the ownership responsibilities, we do things like operations and maintenance, flood operations, capital planning, maintenance projects, capital projects, etcetera. So for a brief overview of Act 121, require the establishment of a committee to study dam failure, emergency operation planning in Vermont and basically look for ways to improve upon what we have here. The committee focused on high hazard potential dams, which are dams where failure would result in probable loss of human life. And just so people can understand, dams are classified. All dams in the state are classified according to this classification system. And there's three main classification. There's high hazard potential, which has the definition I just mentioned. There's significant hazard potential dams, which are dams that if the dam were to fail, loss of life would not be probable, but extensive property damage, environmental damage or damage, other concerns is expected. For a low hazard dam, is one that is located in an area, if it were to fail, it would have minimal downstream impacts. When we talk about determining whether or not probable loss of life or not, that's evaluated through doing hydrologic models of the dam and doing a simulated dam failure analysis, and then looking at potential dam failure, flood depths and velocities at key locations downstream of a dam like houses, buildings, roadway crossings, etcetera. And then there's federal guidance that kind of helps you understand using depths and velocities from dam failure flows if that's survivable or not. And that allows us to classify the dams in one of those three buckets. So for high hazard dams in general and in Vermont, we can get a result where we have, we think of a potential for one or two loss of life or potentially loss of life in the hundreds. That whole potential for loss of life or probable loss of life is all bracketed into the high hazard definition in the classification. Just to talk a little bit about the EOP committee that was formed. The committee members are listed here. They represented state officials, BEM and DSP, the safety program, RPC was represented, RPC Regional Planning Commission were represented, Dam owners were represented. Both GMP and Morrisville Water and Light had representatives and then we also had representatives from local emergency management. Basically, town level emergency management and innocent commanders. In addition to the formal committee members you see here, we also invited in some other experts and people that in the same areas, RPCs, dam owners, and local EMD, IC Engine Commander roles to help. While their names are not here, they still provide a lot of valuable input in the final product. The scope of the of the committee, we met up meeting nine times. We worked on identifying guiding principles and challenges with developing emergency operation plans for dam failure in Vermont. And we ultimately developed the legislative report that I'll briefly talk about here. Just take a quick step back on high hazard dam front. There are roughly 74 high hazard dams in the state of Vermont. The map here shows where they're located. And again, that's that that could range from potential like just a few people to to the hundreds and I'd like to note that high potential dam failure is considered a low probability, high consequence event. Meaning, it doesn't happen very often and thankfully, it doesn't But if it were, it would result in fairly high consequences. We take

[Rep. Rob North (Member)]: it pretty seriously. Representative.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: I just wanted to ask with the oncoming of climate change and changing weather patterns, does that classification change at all in terms of, do you move with like the amount of rain and be classified or reclassified deaths?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: So, yes, hazard potential classifications are a dynamic classification. They they do change for a variety of factors. Typically, when you evaluate the hazard classification of a dam, you look at both a failure under normal conditions like say like today where water levels are near normal levels but nobody's expecting it. So it has an element of surprise that has a threat level risk level to it. And then we also look at dam failure during a major flood, which is obviously a lot more water gets released. However, people are already engaged and aware of what's going on. So this the two ends of the scale is what we look at. Certainly, as we see in the data, our dams are being asked to do more in terms of floods than they ever have been. If we look at our flow control dam data, we've had more top 10 flood pools in the last twenty years than we had in the first seventy years of operation. So we do account for it, I guess, in that way. The other way hazard potential classifications change is really what's a lot to do with what's downstream of the dam. So the classic example is have a low hazard dam out in the middle of a farm field that if it failed, it really wouldn't impact much of anybody, maybe the farmer. And then, you know, a developer buys that property and puts houses down in that what was a hay field or whatever. And now that low hazard dam that had real no consequence, now it's a high hazard potential dam because of the change in downstream development. So that's the most common change that we see. That's something we always check for when we evaluate dams see if

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: there's a change. Yep.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Well, here. These pie charts just hopefully show first how the 74 high hazard dams in the state are broken up by dam safety regulator. Dams are regulated by multiple entities in the state of Vermont with essentially no overlap. Vermont DEC regulates of the 74, roughly 50 of the dams. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is the federal entity that regulates power dams has 13 high hazards. Federal dams such as those regulated by the Army Corps of owned by the Army Corps of Engineers like the Connecticut River Flood Control dams are essentially self regulated. So they're their own entity and they have seven of those. And then the Public Utility Commission has four. So that's sort how the high hazard dams are broken up by regulator in the state. And then a second chart shows how the high hazard dams are broken up by owner type. You'll notice that a large percentage of the dams are privately owned. And that is actually a pretty common finding both in Vermont and across the nation, roughly 60% of dams are privately owned. So privately owned dams are essentially the most common ownership type that you can handle.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Just

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: going back to the previous slide to this. Well, one of the slides anyway, I'm looking and maybe you'll present this later, but we've seen a graphic from one of the appendices that shows high hazard dams broken out by loss of life or potential loss of life, and there's a category with 11 dams for over a thousand people.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Yes.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: You keep saying they're either in the tens or hundreds, but there's also classification for those dams that are over a thousand. Right? I'm just a little confused.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: So what you're referring to, I was gonna talk a little bit about when I get to the bill, but there's a, so we talk about potential for lost life. There's also a loss of life downstream from a dam. There's also a term called population at risk, P A R. Went a little bit out of order here, so I don't have a slide to explain it. But population risk is essentially if you have a dam failure and that causes a certain flood inundation zone downstream, everybody that's likely to be within that inundation zone is is added basically in the population at risk and that can be that can range from people who have a wall of water coming over the roof of their houses and are likely to lose their life all the way down to people that have an inch of water in their backyard. It's essentially the estimate of everybody that could be within that zone when the dam fails. And so that's a fairly common way to help us sort of understand, you know, the level of population risk kind of helps us understand really what the level of risk of the dam is. It's not directly used in the hazard potential classification. It's a little bit of a different use for it. Because sometimes you have a dam, we have a relatively high population at risk, but the life loss is quite low, or you can have vice versa. It kinda depends on a lot of the variables in the downstream area.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: So is the information about how many the loss of life, how many you're how many are, you know, identifying for each dam, is that available publicly?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: So I I was

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: completing those two things.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: So correct. Yeah. So life loss of life is usually a fraction of population at risk. There's a multiple ways to calculate that. There's some federal national formulas that have done studies that have kind of suggested for urban or rural areas way to kind of calculate and there's simple way of going like spot by spot house by house and sort of counting them individually. So, it's a variety of ways to calculate loss of life and that can be variable. Population risk is a little more easily computed because we can all agree that the number of people that are in average houses, business sizes and things and have to calculate that more accurately. But they are sort of two different things. A high hazard dam is related to the lost life. It's independent of population at risk. But I mean, that said, most high hazard dams that are gonna have usually have a higher population at risk than a low hazard dam. So there's like that general connection.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: What I'm hearing is you have a pretty accurate sense of population at risk and that you're calculating an estimation of loss of life based on that and maybe some other factors. And so that you are calculating the loss of life per dam, but that's not necessarily public information?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Obviously, not in every case till we calculated potential life loss. Mean, once we get purposes of high hazard classification, once you get into life loss, you've made a classification requirements. You may not actually go and calculate all of the life loss of life. And I mean, as with anything, population risk is also, I mean, we calculate that. We have this computer program that calculate it when you run the analysis, there's a variety of ways to calculate that as well. And the date we have data for all of the dams that we write, high hydro dams that we regulate. Now the graphic you're talking about in the report, all the 50 hydro dams that we regulate, we have PAR data. There's, I would say very accurate PAR data in that subset of 50 exams that haven't had that level of study and have more of an estimate. So we're doing the best we can with the data we have available, but there's little bit

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: of a range in the accuracy. That's super helpful. Thank you. So

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: it's got two documents or two processes in play when we talk about dam failure and what's going to happen downstream. And there's two main items. One is the emergency action plan and the other is emergency operations plan. And this the work that was done in the legislative report and then the test and the legislation and the legislation, proposed legislation really considers emergency operations plan. But just so people don't get confused because they are sort of, they are very integral documents and yet they're different at the same time. An emergency action plan is a plan that's usually written and developed by the dam owner. And the most important part of that emergency action plan is they hire an engineer to do that simulated dam failure and develop those inundation maps to figure out, God forbid, should this dam fail, where are the areas of highest risk? What's the time for the flood to arrive there? Where are the depths and velocities to all these various locations? That's the most important piece. The emergency action plan also includes communication protocols between the dam owner and the local emergency management, state emergency management people. And it usually also includes some basic provisions and ideas for the dam owner to either help delay a potential dam failure or maybe stop it altogether. So the EAP is really an owner document. They pay for it. They're responsible for keeping it up and running. And also part of the responsibility is the emergency, is the dam owner shares this with the municipalities downstream of the dam. So then they can take the next step, which is essentially the emergency operations plan. In the perfect world, the local emergency managers and the commanders in the towns downstream of a dam meet with the dam owner, they want to train them on how the EAP works, how to read the maps, the areas of greatest risk are, and then emerge. And those local emergency management folks look at their personnel, their equipment, their approach on how they manage emergencies, and they build their own plan on they're evacuate, where they're set their base of operations, what roads are gonna close in what order, and those kinds of things. So that's more like a local planning effort to respond to a dam failure. So those are the two differences between emergency action plan and emergency operation plan. The guys, of So the guiding principles that were identified by the committee are listed here. I'm just kind of go through them somewhat quickly, I suppose. Just kind of as with anything EAPs and EOPs are both proactive emergency planning documents. The success of them have a lot to do with the effort put into them. Lot have to have a lot to do with getting the right people in the room to make sure that they're really capturing the people who are gonna be on the ground. How are they actually gonna, what are they actually gonna do? We identified that there was a need for increased dam safety awareness amongst municipalities. I think that's something that has improving even in my time in this position, but something that could stand to be further improved. So many municipalities are small in Vermont and have so many things on their plate and sometimes a remote event, high consequence type event like a dam failure or something that's hard for them to focus on. EAPs are developed. The next two bullets are around the previous slide of which EAPs are owner documents that really focus on inundation mapping and communication, emergency communications to downstream municipalities and EOPs are really municipal documents to help protect people and property from dam failure. In order to have an effective EOP, you have to have a regularly updated and effective EAP. Without an effective EAP, the people trying to write the EOP don't have a great place to start. And so that's a very important point. Sort of tied back to what I was mentioning earlier about municipalities, local support for emergence preparedness is very important to put this time in for doing this preparedness. The Portland municipalities have so many things that they're trying to cover that these are things that fall through the cracks. One the things that we saw as we studied examples of successful and unsuccessful EOPs was that trust relationship building between parties was key to success. We saw examples where there was a great relationship built between the dam owner and the downstream emergency managers and the commanders, and they have a fantastic plan that's very actionable. Everyone knows their roles and it's very effective. And we saw other cases where that relationship perhaps get more adversarial and just not really a very successful effort. So that's really a very important thing and importantly, many planning objectives. And then another important point is that in order for these plans to be effective, in the state of Vermont, we don't have regional level government. We don't have a county level government. So in the event there was a dam failure, ultimately the municipality is the one that's gonna be responding to that and ultimately responsible for carrying out the emergency actions. So having people that are going to do that, the incident commanders and emergency management folks in those individual municipalities and heavily involved in the development of these EOPs is absolutely critical. Without that, you sort of get a generalized plan developed by outsiders that that really is going to be a lot of value in an event. One of the challenges with this is funding. I maintenance valets don't have the funding to do this nor the time or manpower to get these in place. That's obviously a challenge. So again, I work for the Dam Safety Program. What our role? We have both of worked on both sides of this. As a dam owner, we're responsible for having emergency action plans and have them up to date and sharing them with downstream communities. And that's something that we've certainly strived to do and gotten better, I think since and during the twenty twenty three floods. And on the regulatory regulator side, there's pending upcoming rules, but it will be our responsible charge to make sure that all high and significant hazard dam owners develop and maintain up to date emergency action plans. That's one challenge we have in the state is that for damage regulated by the DEC historically, we've not had the authority to require emergency action plans. Many dams do have emergency action plans, but we don't have the, we've not historically had the authority to require they be updated and maintained. And so we have a mismatch, unfortunately, of emergency action plans. But hopefully that's going be cleaned up soon and that issue will be resolved. Representative Chittenden.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: I don't know if you're about to do this, but there were definitely a number of questions that came up yesterday about the rules that are coming out and what they're about. Can you just quickly walk us through what to expect and the timeline?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Sure. So the technical standards. The mandated rules have been worked on are a two part rule. The first part was administrative standards. Those got put in place, I think, in 2020. And then technical standards is the second part that we've been trying to get in place that are going to basically provide technical guidance around dams for things, for a wide variety of topics, including emergency action plans, operation and maintenance plans, compliance with inspection results. Historically, our program has not had the authority to inspect the dam, find efficiencies, and then compel owners to make safety improvements. But that's going to come to an end. We will have the authority in the future to compel safety improvements. So that's a major change in the authority that we have, but it should ultimately be a positive change in that. Unfortunately, we do have fairly large number of dams that have you know, not well maintained historically largely because, you know, there was no real impact to negative impact to the owner for not doing well. So those are the main things that those rules will consider. We're we're still drafting them now. Actually have a pretty decent rough draft developed. We're gonna hopefully in the around the springtime, early summer, we're gonna be doing an informal rule roll. Well, first we're gonna be doing it since we're going from basically unregulated to a very regulated condition, we're gonna be doing it in peer review on the rules to make sure that they're in line with federal standards, as well as what other states are doing, make sure we're not asking too much or too little. And then we're going to be doing an informal rule meeting with our regulated base. We did this in administrative standards as well before entering formal rulemaking process. We had like 130 people attend and had a logical, I think 60 to 100 public comments and incorporated those into the draft rules. Then we'll enter ICAR and LCAR with a goal to have them in place early twenty seven. Hopefully we'll have a flood this year to take our time away from that. So some of the major committee findings and recommendations from the report, As I already mentioned with a lack of regional authorities and government of our office, Vermont is to keep the responsibility at the municipal level. I think we identified that that's the best way to go and yet they need help. I think one of most important part of recommendations that came out of the report was this concept of a pilot project to produce emergency operations plans for one to two state owned dams to test the process to determine more accurate costs. That was something that we really struggled with. A few good examples that we had and we're aware of from our committee, it was very difficult to put this data together. These were sort of grassroots efforts that took many years to get to the finish line. And this case, we would not it would be much quicker to get these from inception to completion. So it's difficult to go off examples that we had. And then as part of that pilot project, I think it's important to once we do complete it, just take a step back and look at what worked, what didn't, come up with some recommendations around best methods, lessons learned, and also recommendations around what instructional materials, templates, etcetera, can we do to hopefully streamline this process and make it better and easier and more effective for others to try to follow. We identified the challenges with EOP funding, and there is some potentially federal opportunities that could be used for funding and obviously state opportunities to be very helpful. And then ultimately in terms of how to develop these emergency operations plans, we looked at four alternatives. The options. So the first option is basically the way it's done now, is the municipality responsible for preparing the dam failure emergency operations plan. Again, this is unsupported and unfunded mandate, we have fairly low compliance with few exceptions, we have some communities do have these, but many don't. Of a low cost improvement that could be made is we could work to try identify some templates and things that could do some educational opportunities for our local emergency management and commander folks to kind of educate them and give them some tools to hopefully improve. Although, I'm not hugely optimistic it would be as effective as other options. And options two through four basically addresses the manpower challenge with this by considering potentially three different entities that could kind of step in to maybe help move this forward and assist municipalities in getting these in place. And option two basically looks at regional planning commissions. Option three looks at VEM regional coordinators and option four looks at a model where essentially consultants hired out to perform this for a set number of dams. And all those options have pros and cons. For example, regional planning commissions. I think in many cases, that's a great way to go. In some cases, some regional planning commissions are probably very well staffed and capable of doing this work and others may be less so. I think there's also challenges where failures don't always stay within regional planning commit boundaries. So it can get quite complicated where you're in multiple boundary planning commission areas and it could get quite complicated. The VEM regional coordinator option also seems like a wise option. And yet I think they're, you know, they're they're pretty strapped in terms of what their capabilities are and what their what their manpower is and funding it to be able to to initiate this and keep this moving. And then a consultant option also, you know, obviously, is probably the most expensive option. And, know, sort of, I seem like we lose the most local and state control over it kind of with that option. But like I said, they all have their pros and cons. So, next, I wanted to move on to an overview and some of our comments on House Bill seven seventy eight. I'd like to start by thanking Representative Chapin for meeting us on multiple occasions and involving us in in some of the drafting. I I feel like she definitely took some of our suggestions into account. We appreciate that very much. So, to go down, the road is trying to watch that in the way. Okay. So just some of our comments, I do have these written with page numbers and lines that I can provide after the testimony, but I felt that would be difficult to go through in this context. But there's some general observations or comments that we had is the bill proposes Vermont emergency management develop emergency operation plans for every damage with a population at risk and that was that term that we're talking about earlier but again, population at risk is the number of people that are believed to be within an inundation boundary whether that be likely loss of life or or toward a minimal inconvenience but a two sets two sets from a number of 100 people to nine ninety nine people and then greater than a thousand people essentially for the 100 to nine ninety nine grouping. There's roughly two twenty two DEC regulated dams in that area. That includes two state owned dams, nine municipal dams, and 11 privates. And then for the thousand or greater, PAR estimate, there's roughly 11 DEC regulated dams that meet that criteria. And that includes three state owned dams, are free flood control dams, six municipal and two private. It's unclear to us how, so high hazard dams are regulated by, as I mentioned, the multiple entities, DEC, Public Utility Commission and some are federally regulated. PAR estimates for those dams are not readily available and it's unclear if the legislation intended to include those dams regulated by others or not. I guess I'm we have to do some research to figure out how to obtain PR information for those dams. It may require navigating some critical energy infrastructure information challenges. But again, it's not entirely clear if, during the next bullet, if the scope includes those or it's a subset of DEC regulated dams that are really focused on by legislation. So that's one comment we had. The legislation seems to suggest a single EOP be prepared for each dam. I guess we just wanted to emphasize again that EOPs will be needed for essentially each municipality within an flooded inundation area. A great example is Waterbury Dam. God forbid if that were to ever fail, that flood wave would go from Waterbury all the way to Lake Champlain. You're looking at 16 communities. Ideally, we have one emergency action plan and then we'd have 16 emergency operation plans, one for each community all the way downstream. And so that becomes quite an effort. It's it's that each customized plan is designed around each individual municipalities approach manpower equipment who they're going to ask for mutual aid. All of those things have to be sort of repeated and customized for each of the 16 communities. So I just want to be very clear that that that's that's the only way for us to really accomplish the goal, which is really to have effective documents that that can be used in the in the event of an emergency. Representative Chapin?

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: Yeah, this is worth a little time. Think what we We heard some good stories yesterday that sort of illuminated how this might in a really rare event of such a failure or in a risk of a failure or opening of releases, Because it impacts those communities in a systematic way and because it takes out road, potentially other infrastructure, it seems really clear that most municipalities would not be able to handle their own, particularly evacuations alone, especially for smaller communities. And so there's just such coordination between the municipalities that seems to be absolutely required, if not also support from the state or from the National Guard or resources we pull into this level of evacuation. And we talked a lot about how ideally, this isn't a surprise in the moment. This is something that the damn owner and leaders in the community have been watching carefully for maybe days and your team, part of it is not what you do in the moment because what you do in the hours or day beforehand, knowing that the floodwaters might get to a certain level. So I guess what I'm trying to ask about is I feel like there's clearly a regional planning need and each municipality is going need its own marching orders and plans. Did you hear about in the study committee or in your experience in other states or regionally, how do municipalities in such small rural areas like this where there is potentially 16 communities, how does an EOP work when it's got to be coordinated with? You know, are they really 16 different EOPs or is there some sort of overarching plan and then everybody has their piece of

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: it? So from my understanding, I think in my opinion, it seems like what the committee's findings were, we're talking about 16 individual plans. There doesn't need to be coordination because we can't have all 16 calling on the same several towns for mutual aid because that's not gonna work. There needs to be coordination. But in terms of, like, a overall arching regional approach, again, Vermont is challenging because we don't have really that that level. And other states that I just I talked to have county level government or have basically agreements between multiple towns where they they come together, and they they even have, like, taxing authority, as was mentioned in the in the in the in the report. That sort of thing seemed to be effective for much larger communities that have a lot more resources and tax base and people. If you looked at that kind of model in Vermont, low population sort of make that not work very well either. So I think it's challenging. I think, you know, perhaps the VM could speak better to the best way to actually to set this thing up. But to me, it seems like every single individual town sort of needs to have their own plan because other ones are gonna be there when the event happens and and they need to know what they're doing. And there needs to be coordination between individual ones but to have one overarching plan that essentially go downstream and just hand it to each each each community. It just doesn't seem like that's going to provide the level of specificity to be effective.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: Thanks.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: I've lost my place here. I'm to get back on track. One of the one of the items in the bill seemed to be suggested that BM coordinate with the dam owner regarding substance of acquired EOPs. We're little bit unsure about what the intent of that was in general. Dam owners are not emergency management professionals and may not be well suited for that task. It requires me to submit complete EOPs each municipality with a damper inundation map And as I mentioned, you know, in our, I think about what the committee found is really it doesn't need to say quite a bit at the municipal level with an individual municipal plan. It's not to say there's not there's to be coordination between the individual municipalities, but for it to be most valuable, it needs to be sort of a locally based plan and then the pilot project. I think we're very, we're very supportive of that concept. We think that would bring a lot of value. It indicates that to be focused on state dams with a population at risk of greater than a thousand. There's three state dams that meet that criteria are three flood control dams, Waterbury, Wrightsville, and East Berry. They all share the Winooski River as their downstream area. There's quite a bit of overlap between the three. One comment we had or suggestion was there may be value to perform a pilot. If there's going be two projects can be selected, there may be value to select one of those and then perhaps a different state owned dam as perhaps maybe has a lower PAR, but is located in a more rural area and an area with less resources outside the Winooski Valley. So we can kind of bracket the challenge. You know, we sort of have our one of our biggest and baddest dams in the flood control dams and choose one of the other ones that is purposely targeted in an area that may be more challenging and has less resources and fortunately, somewhat in the Winooski Valley, many of the communities do have fire departments. And I'd we're in a fire department, they have staffing. I mean, even more so if we had in the Chittenden County. And there's other areas in the state that just don't have those kinds of resources. And perhaps just to bracket the issue to really understand the challenges that we face as we try to stand these things up, Choosing one from that and one from a a different group of Ding of DAMs, may just be more effective from a learning perspective from from the exercise. That that was what we had for presentation today.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Representative North. Thank you, chair. Thank you so much, Ben, for your participation. Maybe I missed it,

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: but it seems

[Rep. Rob North (Member)]: like the primary classification that we're focusing on for prioritizing our work is the is the hazard of the time. How many people would potentially be affected if there were a catastrophic failure? Seems to me that we ought to be focusing also, or at least using as a prioritization scheme, what is the probability of failure of a given dam? That seems to be maybe even more important in terms of classifying these things and prioritizing not only the creation of the EAPs and EOPs, the prioritizing of the dam maintenance and the infrastructure maintenance and maybe the testing of the floodgates and all that kind of stuff. It seems like we had a we gotta know which of these dams is at highest risk of failure. They do we must have that information. So so, yeah,

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: that that there's we do, and that's sort of handled with a simplified approach and then also a much more involved approach. So, on the simplified way that that's looked at is our program runs a periodic inspection program of state regulated dams. I'm kind of talking about that subset of dams, the 50 high hazard dams, but we run a periodic inspection program. We inspect high hazard dams every two years, and they're given a condition rating, essentially satisfactory, fair, poor, unsatisfactory. So that is sort of the simplest way to look at which ones are up to and we only look at physical condition, but we look at general compliance with a basic set of standards. So essentially the dams are in satisfactory condition are not only maintained well and in good condition, but they meet most standards where damage in poor condition likely is not maintained very well and is likely missing in terms of some of the standards. So that's like two years for every dam? Every two for high hazard dams. Yeah. Five person every five years for significant and ten years for a low that that assessment is done. That's called like a standards based approach. And then the second thing you kind of mentioned was risk. How do we account for risk? And so in dam safety, there are things called risk assessments, these are pretty involved studies, and they've been done on some of our high hazard dams, not all, where we look at what are we do first, we look at what's called the failure modes. How could this dam potentially fail at called PFMs? And we generate a list of potential failure modes, and then we say, okay, what is the, what loading condition would have to come for that to occur? And so then you assign a probability to that. You say, okay, the one hundred year storm could cause that or the one thousand year storm. So it is your probability of the loading condition. And then you have a chain of events. What's the probability of chain of events occurring when the dam fails? And you have the downstream inundation mapping, you look at what your level of consequence. And that gives you essentially, allows you to sort of say rack and stack by highest risk. And then there's essentially acceptable risk tolerance, which is, this is where I guess, like standard based approach is very black and white. If you don't make this standard, then this is a problem where risk based is a bit more gray because you know, there's acceptable risk and unacceptable risk. And there's a lot more that goes into that. We don't necessarily have risk assessments for every one of our 50 high hazard dams. We did an assessment using some federal funding on, I believe, six high hazard dams in the state that were in poor condition. We've had them done on our three flood control dams and we've had them done on 15 other state high and significant hazard dams. So that data does exist for many, but not all of the dams that we regulate. And yes, that is something that comes into consideration. On the dam safety side, those are the ones that we most actively and plan to most accurately regulate once we have our full rules in place. If have a high hazard dam, it's in poor condition and it ranked high in that those assessments, that's where we're going first because that's going to buy down risk the fastest.

[Rep. Rob North (Member)]: How many dams fall into that category? High hazard and high risk. Do we have any?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: High hazard and poor condition? I believe we have 16. I have to double check that figure. And? Or condition? Believe we have 16. Okay.

[Rep. Rob North (Member)]: And of those 16, how many have had this risk assessment done that's showing that the probability is non zero?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: I don't know off the top of my head. Have to check that figure. But, again, the state owned dams and that subset of six ones that were done with the highest potential dam work. So by more than half.

[Rep. Rob North (Member)]: And what what's aside from asking for more money, of course, that's always the answer, but what's needed to start doing the work necessary to get those high risk or poor conditioned dams back then?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: That's why we're getting our dam safety standards in place is so critical. Right now, don't have the authority to unless it's an imminent failure scenario, we're to be clear, that's not what these are. In the exception of that, we don't have the authority to require the owners to take measures. So that's why getting the rules in place is so critical. We have a program already kind of planned out where the first step the owners may be required to do is what's called a comprehensive assessment, which is basically a holistic look at the whole dam, includes some risk work like I was discussing earlier and then political alternatives. What needs to be done to get this dam up to standard and lower the risk? And then from that, they would move to design and construction. Regulatorly, that's the pathway. Another challenge is funding is that many dam owners are gonna struggle with funding those projects because we've been actually working this program a little bit on our state inventory, and we're working projects through a risk assessment into a comprehensive assessment to design and to construction. And each of those steps can be costly. We're seeing comprehensive assessment costs in the 100,000 to $150,000 range. Design construction, design can be $250,000 to $500,000 It kind depends on a lot of variables, but I'm throwing some general numbers. Then rehabilitation construction, again, can be lower, but in the millions is not uncommon too. So these are high value projects. Okay. Thank you very much for sharing that there are none imminent failure. Imminent failure, I wouldn't be sitting here

[Rep. Rob North (Member)]: right now. That's reassuring. Yeah. We'd help you out. In the current bill, as it's structurally, I don't see any accounting for the risk the condition rating or risk assessment to determining the prioritization of things. If we're gonna I don't wanna just blanket ask every high hazard damage. To those who are not familiar with the terminology, it might sound like, Oh, high hazard. Lives are at risk. We're gonna run for the hills. But maybe it ought to be tempered, well, let's use that word, by what the risk of any dam failure actually might be. What's your feeling?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Yeah, sure. I suppose that's possible. Again, I think are using the visual inspections, the condition rating and the risk work to prioritize regulation, which will hopefully sort of like handle on the upstream side of the problem. We're going to try to make that dam more robust and safer. And then the emergency action plans and emergency operations for handling the downstream end of the problem, which is God forbid, we had a high release and or uncontrolled release failure. This is what we would do. I think we also need both. But I guess I fear somewhat that, you know, I think it's worthwhile. I think every high hazard dam should have an EAP, have an EOP. And I don't know that. I think ultimately they should all have them. And I don't know if prioritizing them by that is really a lot of side work that I'm not sure is going to benefit the ultimate need in the end, is I think every day should have that. And on the other side of it, we're trying to deal with it and use data to actually make improvements at the So I think it's sort of covered

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: in that regard. Thank you.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Austin?

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Yeah. I'm just wondering about warning systems. I mean, I just have to imagine I and even after the Texas floods, looked at, warning systems that are out there and there are warning systems that like days ahead, where they can see rain coming or rain predicted and just kind of keep falling. Do we require like every dam to have a warning system that could take lives? So there's a siren or something that goes off that people know they have to evacuate when the roads are not flooded and 89 is open and they can get out?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: We do not require dams to have a warning system. There's a lot of variables that go into warning systems where we've evaluated siren systems for Waterbury Dam and are considering maybe going that route. That would be like a siren system that would certainly still have a lot of human input before that was sounded. I think they have their pros and cons. There's people that swear by them, people that would say they're a nuisance and not effective. So it sort of depends on the situation and for a siren system in terms of early monitoring. And that's where technology is only making things better and safer is that we can see hopefully see these events sooner and be more prepared. You still have those occasional events like in St. Johnsbury in 2024. It was where I mean, sort of no one saw that one coming. I woke up in the morning and saw they got absolutely nailed. So, know, I guess, you know, early monitoring of of weather is is critical and a very important element to this and every diligent dam owner should be doing that. And then in terms of at dams, there's, you know, instrumentation that can help the dam owner with that. There's water level instruments. There's instruments that measure water levels in the dams and basically dam performance that can kind of be like, as you mentioned, like an early warning system, you kind of see it coming before that issue gets to you. Lot of that is gonna simply be moderate. Some of the simpler dams are just diligent operations to maintenance and oversight. There's really not like a turnkey early warning system. You could just buy for every dam and it would sort of solve the problem. Of course, it's more nuanced and complicated than that.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: And also, have you, has there been any thought to having mutual aid assigned to, let's say, you know, a town that is gonna be flooded because their emergency responders will not be able to respond because they are flooded and they're looking for their families or their kids in school or whatever. So is there any thought to saying the thinking that if this town is hit, that this town who hasn't been hit, it would come in with equipment and, you know, services.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Yeah. I mean, I think in many cases, those things exist. And I think that's really one of the key points of an emergency operation plan being on the municipal level is that we'd look for each municipality. Not an area where coordination would be needed, but who can help these communities that are in the fray? I guess we need to make sure every community is not calling on the same people and does this make sense? Really, what do we expect for travel challenges and and etcetera during these events?

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Or it would be a sign, you know, that if water berries hit this town would come in and if another town was hit, there's another. Just so I just don't think it's I don't think during an emergency, you know, emergency responders with better experiencing the emergency can respond.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Yep. And this is probably an area that's a lot Yeah. Born there with house of mind.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Okay. Thank you.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I just have one question for you. Most of the high hazard dams are on a routine every two year inspection. Correct. If there's a loading incident in between, is there an assessment or evaluation of the dam's post incident?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: So there certainly can be the integrity of it. Yeah. We call those non periodic inspections done outside that normal two year window for a high hazard dam. A great example of that is the twenty twenty three flood. We actually after that flood loading event, we inspected nearly 400 dams across the state on, you know, whether scheduled or not just to, you know, check on their performance and how they're faring and issues like that. So yeah, the answer is yes. That's part of a of a severe loading condition, they would be follow-up inspections. Thank you.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Representative Jacob.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: Thanks, chair. I would love to go back to that conversation that's what I brought at the beginning of the question, which is unresolved about EOPs for FERC and other dams that fall outside of DEC jurisdiction. Because I think that the goal here is to make sure municipalities are prepared and have EOPs. And so I do think it was generally our intention, although we sort of figured out we needed to figure this out after the drafting deadline. Could you talk about what the you said there's some data that you don't have, so we don't even know which ones are high hazards. So could you just talk about the reality of what we do have access to to help us identify where we might want to prioritize EOPs?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Sure. And we know which ones are high hazard, but I have no regulatory authority over those dams. So I'm less familiar with them. I have no authority to visit them, to get data on them, those etcetera. So our familiarity with them is much lower. We do have good relationship with the Army Corps of Engineers, Green Mountain Power and things like that. So we have some general awareness, but we don't have that level of acute awareness of those facilities. And for example, what they're like, they all have a PAR estimate? I would guess they probably do. Certainly the Army Corps ones I'm sure do. And I imagine a lot of the FERC ones do as well. I don't know how to get that data that may be relatively a simple project to try to figure out, but I just don't know. And so that would, know, we have to figure out how to do that. And then one challenge you can run into with, in our experience with some of the FERC regulated dams is they have the critical energy infrastructure information where, and as a way to protect critical infrastructure, sometimes getting information can be challenging. I think that's maybe less so for emergency planning, but certainly that would be a hurdle that would need to be discussed. The sensitivity around that would be understood. A subset of And dealing with a subset of damage where I think ultimately might be a little bit less helpful just because we don't know like we've been to all know all the damage pretty well. We don't know those other ones very well. So our utility is lower on those ones just because we don't have the authority nor the experience with them because they're not our purview. And just to follow-up.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: PUC ones are moving over time to your jurisdiction. Beyond that, what are the ones so ultimately, do we know how many dams we must know how many dams are there that won't be under peak not DEC.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: We don't know that yet. So part of there was a bill passed, I guess last year that by 2028, all public utility commission dams, is roughly 22 in total are going to theory come to the dam safety program for regulation. Basically PUC is getting a dam safety regulation. A step in that legislation was to have what's called FERC determination done on each dam to make sure that these power producing dams shouldn't actually be under FERC jurisdiction as opposed to ours. So it's likely that, I guess there's four high hazard dams that PUC regulated. It's unclear if all four will come to us or all four will go to FERC or will be split. I don't know. That's still up in the air. That's one piece. That's why I forgot the second part

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: your question. Really, what is the number that in the end, you know you won't have? Right? What are the FERC and Army Corps of Engineers numbers?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: Yeah. So public public commission's for FERC is 13 high hazard dams at the moment. And these are current figures. Keep in mind, hazard classings can change and usually they don't go down. So, moment we have 13 FERC and seven federal dams. So, roughly twenty twenty dams between FERC and and the federal agencies that own dams. Those are

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: just high hazard or that's a high hazard. Yeah. Thank you. And and do we have totals for those number of dams or all of those high hazard?

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: I don't have the total figure of dams. I can get that if you need it. I don't have the total. Just have the highest in my notes here. Thank you. Okay.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Thank you. We're a tad late. I guess we'll close this one. Members,

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: we'll start with Eric.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: You're good to go. Alright for the record I'm Eric Forne, the director of Vermont Emergency Management. Thank you for the opportunity to testify on H778. To start I want to touch briefly on Act 121 as Ben did the dam safety study that was done last summer. It was a very, very thorough study and detailed a lot of information about dams in Vermont, I encourage everyone to read that. It proposed four solutions, but as mentioned in past testimony, it didn't make a final recommendation on which one of those should be chosen. Four solutions as Ben outlined are having the towns create the EOPs, RPCs create the EOPs, VEM create the EOPs, or hiring a contractor. H778 aligns with choice number three having VEM coordinate the effort. As the study points out there are some pros to this solution. It also points out that there's some very significant cons, the biggest being the VM does not have the capacity to accomplish all of these tasks. I also want to point out and clarify that this study did not mention the additional tasks of training towns, dam owners, and first responders on the plan and then conducting exercises, which are all additional things that this seven seventy eight is asking above what the study recommended. So VEM is recommending that this bill review be reduced to just the pilot projects only at this time. The pilot project develops the tools that will be needed to do the planning, training, and exercise that are required in the first half of the bill. The current version of the bill creates a timeline for the remainder of the work now before the pilot is actually completed. This creates an environment where several significant variables, templates, rollout structures, costs are all unknown and it sets an expectation of completion independent of the result of the pilot. The pilot will most likely highlight several gaps and resources that are needed to meet the expectations in this bill. Those gaps will need to be addressed before the remaining dams can be successfully completed. Just for some context, the current timeline has the pilot project completing two dams, including creating the templates and the processes by 2028. That would leave roughly 29 dams to do the planning, training, and exercise for in the next three years. So 29 dams over three years is about one dam per month to draft the plan, train on the plan, exercise on the plan. So just on context, a normal timeline for a plan that incorporates several towns, multiple first response agencies, and a critical infrastructure owner would take about a year for one plan. Additionally, training and exercise would take an additional six months. So after the pilot is completed, a more realistic timeline could be created, which would include time to close any gaps that were defined in the pilot. Bifricating the creation of the planning, training, and exercise pilot structure from the timeline to complete all the damn reviews allows times to ensure that the process is adequate and resourced properly. So I didn't did have comments on the first half, but because my recommendation is to just go with the second half, I didn't include that in my testimony. So, basically, what we're looking for is let's create the car before we drive it. Let's do the project, outline what it's gonna take, you know, how VM isn't necessarily resourced at this time. What does that mean? Can we reach out to RPCs? Can they support? You heard some of that testimony yesterday. The structure of VM, you know, does it fall in our planning section? Is it in our outreach section? Where where does that go? It's gonna take some space and time. As someone mentioned, we do do plans a lot in house for ourselves. We do work with municipalities, a lot on their plans. So how can we work with the towns as, you know, Ben mentioned, really, it's the town that's affected. The town needs an EOP. So they're the ones to know which roads to go on. They're the they know which direction to travel. They know which first responders can or can't respond, which mutually companies need to come in. So this pilot project would have to work holistically in a region because the dam owner and and the dam isn't gonna affect the region, but they're gonna have to work with each individual municipality. We all know getting one municipality in a room to to work on a plan is a lot of work. Now we wanna get six that are overlapping because as we mentioned, you can't take x to z x town's mutual aid if y is trying to take them too. So just getting that group together is gonna take some time while we're building the process. It'll be a little bit quicker on on the third try, whereas you you have the templates, have the structure, you kinda know the pitfalls that we already stepped in. That's our suggestion is that we build the project, kind of come up with the best case scenario on how to get all those towns on board and then make it something that you can replicate. There 's a lot of dams across the state, big to small, so you're going to have to prioritize some over others. How are we going to go through the order? And then there's also always the resource question. So quickly, you're spitballing, a regional coordinator might be the best solution at VEM, but a lot of our regional coordinators are funded by Homeland Security Grant funding, which wouldn't cover working on this stamp. It's more about incidents that involve security. So we would need to kind of adjust that and and how that works. Out of six regional coordinators, have fully general funded, have a lot of latitude, but they're only specific regions. So if we're working out a dam in a different region, would we have to move them? How we would move funding around? So lots of questions there. And I I see that there's funding in here for the pilot project, and I think that would be fundamentally the best way to do it, where whomever, regional coordinators, regional planning, you know, we're setting up meetings, so it involves some some work and logistics there. We could just code to that funding source, the 02/2025, and DC had some in there too for some of their work. You heard yesterday, like, RPCs creating or even local towns creating new maps because some of the the maps that the dams have are kinda sketchy at this point, so they need to be more representative actual flow. And does that involve, ADS and their GIS folks, which we have some kind of, allowed to come in and do some work for us. So so that just you know, how big is this project gonna be? And I think as you peel back the the onion layers, it it's a pretty big project. And specifically, the two pilots because you're building the car. Once you have the car built, it might be easier to drive, and then you can roll it out. But that's our suggestion is that we we work on the pilot projects first. Happy to take any questions.

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: I think you you just did outline some about your staff, but I think it would help our team who isn't very familiar with the EM to just understand how long your agency has been around, how it's structured, how it's funded really briefly. Just any parallels where you do this kind of work, Yeah. Other parallels, I think, you know, Yankee came up yesterday. Yeah.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: So the background on VEM, we're a division under the Department of Public Safety. So we have about 31 staff members spread between five sections. So we have an operations logistics section, which I think that keeps us running and all our technology running. We have an engagement section, does outreach to local municipalities and supports local municipalities. We have a planning section which develops and implements the state emergency management plan. Our distribution plans are all of our annexes that basically define how we're going to react in an emergency and a disaster. So they're consistently working on that with state partners. We have then a recovery section which works on basically recovering from specific disasters and then mitigation, which works on projects to mitigate future destruction, which is also based on money from current disasters. So in a nutshell, on the funding side, we're about 70% federally funded. So all those positions. So as soon as you get a portion of each one of those sections. So the engagement section is a good example. They we recently went from three to six legislators. She gave us a couple extra. So we went down from a 100 towns each to 50 towns each. So I, you know, push them out to local municipalities. They're working with them hand in hand on their local emergency management plans. Each town by statute has to have a local emergency management plan. By statute, they also have a a local emergency management director. That's a lot of words on paper that's not supported by any resources. We ask them to do it. They're also the fire chiefs. They're also the select board member. They're also the dog catcher. So we ask a lot of them, and they do a great job. We've developed a lot of things to provide them training. So in situations like this, writing plans, opening their EOCs, we do lots of support there. But again, they're taxed on what what they're doing. So it's a perpetual issue that we're trying to understand how to resource them so they can help us. And one of those ways was getting some regional coordinators to go out and literally sit at the desk with them and work on their plan. The local emergency management plan is that plan that's supposed to come off the shelf when something bad happens and it's an all hazard event. So you know there's is it a large wildfire? What can you do? Is it an active shooter at the school? What can you do? So, it it gets them to think about what their resources are, right? I need 17 ambulances in Addison County. Well, that's going be very difficult. We don't have 17. So, how can I make my plan incorporate, you know, larger EMS response? So, really, it's getting in there and kind of peeling back the layers to understand what they have available, what they might need. You know, in this situation, we can go in. Most of those towns probably don't have dams on there because most of the towns don't have the dam in their jurisdiction, and they're not thinking downstream like they should be. So I think part of this will be education. So when we go out and talk about X dam in the 10 towns or 16, you know, for Waterbury, like, are they all thinking that? A lot of them don't think that way. And, you know, I have what I call disaster amnesia where they forget about the last flood of twenty three and the fact that five dams failed. And they have to move on to the next thing, and so we understand that. So we try to support them, but we're also, you know, taxed and we only have 31 folks. Initiating a large project like this is is something that's hard to fit in. We think it's a good idea, but we just want to make sure this it's resourced in a way that makes it actually come out with a good product. So that's going be yeah. And you talked a little bit about Yankee. I mentioned that yesterday where the other way you could think about this project is the dam owners, They have their EAP, but they're the one with the hazard, right? So when you're Vermont Yankee, they created the hazard, right? They built a nuclear facility, so they were the ones that had to pay the towns, EMDs, to do training. They were the ones that had to structure the training. They were the ones that worked with Vermont State Emergency Operations Center and funded us to do a lot of training.

[Ben Green, Section Chief, DEC Dam Safety Program]: So the onus was put a little

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: bit on them, this is the problem that you've created. It's a great asset, but there's ramifications. You need to adjust that. And some of the dams we work with are great hydro, great northern hydro, I think is one of them. They have a bunch along the Connecticut River and you know, they have their calls that they go out during exercises and they call us or one of them. I know to Ben's point, it kinda stops there. Like, right, they call the towns, then the idea is the town has their EOP. So is there capacity for dam owners to provide some resources to the town to to to work on some of that stuff? And private entities are always issues. There's 10 different regulators that are regulating these dams, so that's a potential issue too. But just the idea that they need some skin in the game because they're the ones that are really causing this harm to be in these areas, potential harm.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: I'm just wondering how costs are kept track of in a disaster. You know, just in terms of is it you know, how how So

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: it's interesting because what you're you're trying to decide quickly is how the disaster is gonna be paid for in the future. So large disaster is pretty easy. FEMA is going to come in. I say that with the caveat now that the federal government's a little bit different. So theoretically, have thresholds per capita thresholds. State of Vermont, if you have an event that causes 1,200,000 worth of damage across the state and then each individual county has a threshold. So let's say the Northeast Kingdom because of its low per capita is only like 60,000. So if they had $60,000 worth of damage and the whole state at 1,200,000.0, then the state can get a federal disaster declaration. I put a caveat there because Sutton had that happen last July 25 and they got denied. So, it's a bit weird now that we're not getting things that we used to get but that's how we used to think, okay, this is a FEMA disaster declaration. We're going to get the money from them. We spend the money because FEMA is a reimbursement. So the towns have to fix their problems because if you don't have to fix it, then FEMA is gonna be like, well, don't really need it. So they have to fix it, then they submit the reimbursement. The town or the state basically runs kind of a negative budget where we spend the money knowing that FEMA is gonna pay us back. If it's something small like Sutton, smaller, or trying to think of, like, Addison County as part of '24, they didn't get the declaration because they were a little bit smaller. But the emergency operation center opens, then I have to fund that out of the general fund. So we have a small bit of money in there that we we try to set aside for things like that, but it also covers if the USAR team has to go out for a nondeclared disaster. So think of Hurricane Debbie that came in September '24. It was supposed to hit us pretty good, so we had four of our teams out, three of our teams out plus a team from Connecticut, making sure that we were positioned, but Debbie decided to go a little bit to the West, didn't cause us any issues, so we didn't get a disaster, but all those teams still need to be paid for. So a chunk of it came out of general funds, just for context, that one team out of Connecticut that was here one night twenty four hours cost $35,000. So we have to figure out how to pay for that. So no absolute funding source for it. We have a little bit in general fund. If it's big enough, FEMA will pay for it. If there's a large disaster like this, don't recall a FEMA disaster declaration for a dam failure. We have the same issue with droughts. Droughts are pretty significant and have far reaching effects, but they don't reach a FEMA type structure. Who's going to pay for it? And, know, coincidentally, comes down to is the state going to step in? You know, so things like Sutton, it it was big enough to get a federal disaster, but it didn't get a federal disaster. Is Sutton on its own, or does the state step in? Are there mechanisms for that? So so there's lots of questions.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Hearing, like, from flood insurance? Are peep are they staying? Are they renewing policies? So far, yeah, we've heard the national flood insurance program is working fine.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: I think the biggest catch there is that people don't think they need it. And we heard it a lot after '24. They're like, I've never flooded before in my entire life. And so it it's hard to have an individual that's going paycheck to paycheck, paying for insurance on something that they think will never happen. So kind of educating them on the understanding that that little stream that's behind your house has never flooded before. This new day and age, maybe it will. Maybe we will have some significant events that, you know, take the river and playing field to its hundred year limit that it's never a thousand year limit that's never hit before, and we see a lot of that.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: So Well, they're here. They're staying.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Yeah. NFIP is staying.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Fairly confident. Good.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Yeah. I mean, with the caveat that it's the federal government, and they they're running a deficit a bit. So they they might try to make some readjustments. But as of now, they're they're Good. Staying. Any other questions? Thank you for your time.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Thank you. Happy to hear.

[Eric Forne, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Thank you for looking at this.

[Rep. Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Member)]: Upline.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I see we'll go offline, and if you can do that. Alright. 115.