Mutual Aid for Resilience: Mapping Vermont’s 2023 Flood-Response Networks
In July 2023 Vermont’s Green Mountains were soaked by days of rain, leading to seepage, undercutting, and saturation in what’s now called The Great Floods of 2023. Though Vermont’s communities are accustomed to smaller scale flooding, this flood has rapidly become a key marker of change and danger in collective memory.
This project collaborates with community members, formal responders, and mutual aid volunteers in the Black River Valley to gather ethnographic and geographic data on flooding impacts and responses.
One of our team members collaborated with local mutual aid groups in summer 2023 during the aftermath of the Great Floods and noted a gap:
community members and formal responders do not have easy ways to communicate and collaborate across scales of experience, data, and insight.
Our mapping project begins in this gap. We frame floods as simultaneously social, technical, and natural events which require diverse data for understanding and response. We combine ethnographic and geographic research with engineering and physical sciences data to improve understanding of flood impacts and community resilience.
We hope to use this data to develop a pilot version of a community-driven, accessible mapping tool, designed for communication and collaboration before, during and after inland flooding events. The map will serve as a site through which communication about risk, response, and recovery can more easily pass “up and down scale” among diverse responders, addressing the observed gap in communications and response capacities among different groups of responders and improving resilience.
The impact of these gaps is most evident in tools for communications about risk and recovery—who has access, who really uses them, what is represented in them, and how they are updated them are specific concerns. Our team conducts basic social scientific and geographic research to revise critical understanding of floods as social, technical, and natural phenomena that must be addressed at multiple simultaneous levels. Simultaneously, one of our team members is working on a Masters’ degree thesis that focuses on mapping practices and engineering methods, this proposal focuses on data collection on mutual aid as social practices that inform understandings of the flooding disaster.
Together, these data inform the map we develop. We’re exploring the following questions this summer:
- How do current practices of mutual aid facilitate response to and recovery from the Great Floods of 2023?
- How do different stakeholder definitions of “mutual aid” inform cross-scale understandings of vulnerability, and preparatory practices for future flooding in this area?
- How might social scientists and engineers best collaborate with community groups, activists, and response/recovery professionals to create new knowledge about and mitigation of future inland flooding events?
- What mapping strategies can make State and Federal knowledge about land, place, and response reciprocally available alongside local knowledge and mutual aid on those subjects? How and where can such mapping strategies be housed to become resources for future weather events?