“Did Moses really part the Red Sea — or was it just a drought?”
That was the question posed in a September 22 Instagram reel by Vermont for Real, which shows a woman walking across a rocky land bridge to Lake Champlain’s Mosquito Island. This isn’t the first time that Mosquito Island, aka Fordham Island, off Kill Kare State Park in St. Albans has been accessible on foot. Still, the video highlights the severity of this year’s historic low lake levels.
But just how bad the impacts of Vermont’s drought have been on humans and wildlife depends on where you look.
On Thursday, Richmond Water Resources Department issued an alert to its customers asking them to conserve water by forgoing unnecessary usage because the town water tank didn’t adequately replenish from its well overnight. “This is very unusual,” the alert read.
Indeed. Nearly all of Vermont is now in severe to extreme drought. The month of August was the driest on record since 1895, with rainfall levels 2.6 inches below normal, according to the National Weather Service. The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation has received reports of more than 400 wells running dry since August alone, far exceeding the total number of dry wells reported over the entire previous decade.
“We have a big backlog of wells to drill, and we’re trying to keep up with all the out-of-water calls that keep coming in,” said David Chevalier, owner of Chevalier Drilling in Swanton. The 67-year-old, who’s been drilling wells in Vermont for nearly half a century, said this is among the worst years he’s seen. His crew of 17 is now triaging calls, giving highest priority to farms whose animals and livelihoods are directly at risk. People who have no other water source are also getting moved up on the list.
As for the rest, “Some people just have to wait until the rigs can get there,” he said. In the meantime, he added, “They go see relatives.”
Thus far, most of the problem wells aren’t the deep-drilled variety but shallow wells dug by excavators and fed by surface water or springs, rather than aquifers.
“But the longer the drought goes on, the deeper the effect occurs in the ground,” Chevalier added. In such dry conditions, both animals and humans use more water, putting added strain on pump systems.
Vermont’s hydroelectric dams have also been feeling the squeeze. Great River Hydro, a wholesale power distributor in Westborough, Mass., that sells energy to Green Mountain Power, Burlington Electric Department and other New England utilities, reported that the drought has cut generation on hydroelectric dams along the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers by 50 percent in the past two months.
The drought has also kept the U.S. Coast Guard busy marking previously uncharted hazards on Lake Champlain and relocating existing buoys and other navigational aids into deeper waters. The dwindling lake level has created “a handful” of new problem spots that didn’t exist before, said Chief David McDonald, who oversees the Aids to Navigation team at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Burlington. The station maintains 142 buoys on Lake Champlain between Rouses Point and Whitehall, N.Y., as well those on Lake Memphremagog.
McDonald urged boaters to update their charts and exercise caution even when boating in familiar waters.
“Knock on wood, we’ve only had a few people run aground on Hogback and Colchester reefs,” both of which lie due west of Colchester Causeway near Sunset Island and Law Island, he added. “If you’re a local, you know the route. But if you’re not, you’re taking a risk transiting through there.”
That’s not news to local marinas and boat repair shops, which have seen an uptick in calls due to emerging underwater hazards.
“We have definitely seen a fair amount of damage … where people have hit rocks and reefs that are normally more submerged,” said Peter Casselman, manager of Rosen Marine in South Hero. The low lake level has also created difficulties in getting boats off the water for the season, with a lot of the shallower boat ramps now inaccessible. Even deeper ramps, such as those at Malletts Bay and the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Burlington “are getting challenging,” Casselman said.
Surprisingly, the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department has not seen a major impact thus far on the state’s aquatic creatures. Despite the fact that many headwater streams and rivers in the mountains are down to a trickle or dried up completely, cooler-than-average temperatures this summer helped mitigate the drought’s impact on cold-water fish species, including brook, brown and rainbow trout, according to Will Eldridge, an aquatic habitat biologist with Fish & Wildlife. Currently the state has no plans to place restrictions on fishing.
“Where there’s water, the population seems to be healthy,” Eldridge said. “We’re not seeing signs that the fish are stressed.” He added that brown and brook trout appear to be spawning normally despite low water flow, which normally bottoms out in September before rebounding in October. And because trees draw less water once they lose their leaves, that, too, will mitigate the impact on groundwater.
While Eldridge didn’t want to downplay the drought’s severity, “We expect the fish and wildlife to rebound from this,” he said, “because they’ve evolved with drought.”
