Flood damage is seen on the beach at Harvey’s Lake in Barnet on Oct. 17, 2024. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerThe July 2024 floods hit the small Northeast Kingdom town of Barnet particularly hard, severely washing out roads, stranding residents, damaging homes, severing water lines and inundating farms.Amidst the destruction, residents in search of some normalcy were eager to return to the town beach on Harvey’s Lake, a sandy and grassy area with picturesque views of the water and surrounding hills, featuring picnic tables, a small playground and a pavilion.But that local landmark, too, had been destroyed by the flooding. “The beach is quite an essential part of our recreation and economy and history here in Barnet,” said Dylan Ford, the town’s selectboard chair and librarian. “We really had to try to keep people out of there. It was really, really hot all summer and that is where people go and what people do.”“I had people come into the library and say, ‘I will give you cash to fix the beach,’” she recounted. “It was really heartbreaking for people, I think, after the flood, to not have the joy of the lake.”However, at least at that point, cash wasn’t the central issue. Rather, figuring out what permits and approvals were needed to return the beach to its pre-flood state proved particularly tricky.“We had every [state] department down there trying to figure out what was actually affected and had to be dealt with permit-wise,” said Ford. “Not just for reimbursement, but just for environmental permitting in the state.”Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerIn the intervening months, Barnet officials have made headway in navigating that bureaucratic maze and now have a plan in place to restore the beach by summer. But they’re worried about what the future holds for the town’s beloved beach. During the storm, a massive amount of water overflowed a narrow, winding brook and rushed across the beach’s parking lot. According to Christen Emerson, a longtime member of the town’s beach committee, the deluge emptied a majority of the beach’s sand and deposited debris and silt across the entire property. It also took out a chain-link fence and created two giant holes — one of which has an average depth of 9 feet. When the skies cleared, those holes contained a concrete bench, picnic tables, pieces of building materials and docks from lakefront properties.After assessing the damage and closing off the space, the beach committee set to work emailing, calling and meeting with numerous state and federal officials and departments regarding permits and how exactly the beach should be repaired to potentially prevent or minimize water damage in the future.“With everyone’s heart in the right place, it was a very complicated and confusing process,” Ford said. “At first we were told we couldn’t even put out a design idea without going through all this huge process for permitting with all these different departments.”After a massive amount of work by Emerson and the rest of the volunteer beach committee, Ford said, the project ended up needing solely a town permit. As for the funding, “fingers crossed that FEMA is going to reimburse us,” she said. Ford said that Barnet is “comfortable” with the reimbursements it has received for road repairs. However, she said, “It’s a little scarier when it’s something that could be perceived of as recreation or un-essential or something … but when it comes to beaches, for us, it’s an obvious necessity. For us, it’s part of our livelihood and part of our culture here in Barnet.”At the very end of December, five and a half months after the flood, the selectboard was finally able to award a contract to repair the beach, to be completed by June 1.“At this point, we kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel with the beach,” said Ford. “Hopefully we can move forward with that, knowing what we know now and putting that to use and making decisions hopefully that help mitigate any destruction in the future … that’s all we can do.”But the stewards of Harvey’s Lake Beach remain worried about its long-term future. According to Emerson, there are “huge concerns” the same thing will happen to the beach again. She pointed to nearby rivers and streams filled with debris, the twisting and turning brook that overflowed onto the beach, as well as a nearby defunct dam whose fate has been in limbo for years.“We have — for years and hundreds of thousands of dollars — tried to work with different state departments to try to say, like, look, we need a way to get water over that [dam] faster,” Ford said.This past summer, Ford said, the torrent of water did exactly what town leaders had been afraid it would do. It bypassed a manmade curve in the brook, couldn’t go over the dam because there’s no way to release the massive amount of pressure, and back-flowed across the town beach and into Harvey’s Lake.Harvey’s Lake in Barnet on Oct. 17, 2024. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger”There is discussion currently with the state to try to address the rivers near the beach, as well as the dam, in hopes we can get things corrected in time to avoid another disaster,” Emerson said.Ford also acknowledged the statewide worry that a similar flood event will occur yet again.“Nobody can stop it when water wants to do what it wants to do,” Ford said, noting that a devastating road washout near the former Barnet Village Store last summer looked very similar to photos of the exact same street during the Great Flood of 1927.Despite what Ford described as hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure improvements at that very spot, including bigger culverts, different bridges and stone-lined ditches made per the state’s recommendation, “water went in the same spot and did the same amount of destruction, basically.”“If this happens every year, it’s just unconceivable how we move forward as a state, or as these little rural towns,” she said. “We’re basically just crossing our fingers … we can love our neighbors, we can give someone a ride if they hike down their road, but to really, like fix it [and pay for it], even at the state level, how do you do that?”“It just seems a little overwhelming sometimes,” Ford said.Read the story on VTDigger here: A Northeast Kingdom town’s journey to restore its public beach after last year’s flooding .