Letting the river roam: Surveying the scars left by Irene 15 years later

VTDigger · Bennington Banner · September 7, 2026

Jacob Fetterman (left), coordinator of Trout Unlimited Battenkill Home Rivers Initiative, and Jim Henderson (right), environmental program manager with the Bennington County Regional Commission, at the site of the Green River landslide in Sandgate. Photo by Danielle M. Crosier/Bennington Banner

" data-large-file="https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-1200x903.jpg" /> Jacob Fetterman (left), coordinator of Trout Unlimited Battenkill Home Rivers Initiative, and Jim Henderson (right), environmental program manager with the Bennington County Regional Commission, at the site of the Green River landslide in Sandgate. Photo by Danielle M. Crosier/Bennington Banner

" data-large-file="https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-1200x903.jpg" src="https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-1200x903.jpg" alt="Two people stand on a rocky riverbank surrounded by trees and greenery under a blue sky with clouds." class="wp-image-654373" srcset="https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-1200x903.jpg 1200w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-300x226.jpg 300w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-125x94.jpg 125w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-768x578.jpg 768w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-1536x1156.jpg 1536w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-400x301.jpg 400w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-200x150.jpg?crop=1 200w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-1024x771.jpg 1024w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-780x587.jpg 780w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner-706x532.jpg 706w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/trout-unlimited-bennigton-banner.jpg 1659w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /> Jacob Fetterman (left), coordinator of Trout Unlimited Battenkill Home Rivers Initiative, and Jim Henderson (right), environmental program manager with the Bennington County Regional Commission, at the site of the Green River landslide in Sandgate. Photo by Danielle M. Crosier/Bennington Banner

This story by Danielle M. Crosier was first published in the Bennington Banner on Aug. 28, 2026.

SANDGATE — On a late summer morning along the Green River, the scars of Tropical Storm Irene are still visible on the landscape — even if they now appear to look more like “natural” features.

High above this Battenkill tributary, a towering slope of loose gravel continues its steady creep, collapsing directly into the river.

Locals just call it “the landslide,” but to river scientists and conservationists, it’s a case study in what happens when decades of flood‑control instincts collide with the kind of extreme weather that Vermont has seen since Irene hit 15 years ago.

“It really started letting go during Tropical Storm Irene,” said Jim Henderson, environmental program manager with the Bennington County Regional Commission, during a recent site visit. He noted that the storm’s saturated soils set off slope failures “all over the state of Vermont.”

Standing at the site of the town office, far away from the base of the slope, Henderson sized it up and put the drop at “close to around 300 feet or so.” Later, Jacob Fetterman, coordinator of Trout Unlimited Battenkill Home Rivers Initiative, checked Vermont contour maps and confirmed the slope failure is closer to 220 feet tall — still a deceptively massive wall of loose material hanging above the Green River.

Today, the Sandgate project unfolding below that landslide is part repair job, part course correction — a collaborative effort among the experts to give the river back its flood plain, rather than wall it off and hope for the best.

How a farm berm helped create a 220‑foot landslide

The steep actively failing slope above the Green River wasn’t carved by natural forces alone.

A previous owner spent years stockpiling excess fill along the edge of his hayfield — rocks, river cobbles, chunks of concrete, even car parts. The goal was simple and familiar to Vermont farmers: Keep the water out of the field.

“He built a berm along the edge of the hayfield to keep the water from going into the hayfield,” Henderson said, indicating the rise of the largest sections of the berm. “He wanted to try to contain the river so that his hayfield didn’t get flooded.”

The fix worked in the short term, but at a higher cost to the surrounding landscape and watershed. When Irene and later storms pushed high water down the Green River, the stream had nowhere to fan out. This inability to naturally spread out created a high speed, high intensity, high water, high velocity situation — a powerful, powerful force.

“The river wasn’t able to spread out and go through its natural flood plain during a high water event,” Henderson said, waving an arm along the narrow river channel. “It gets more powerful. It’s like a fire hose.”

Instead of spilling across the field and dropping its sediment harmlessly, the narrowed, supercharged river slammed into a sharp bend at the base of the slope.

“It was literally getting blasted into the base of what is now the landslide,” he said. “Because it’s all gravel, it’s easily erodible.”

Over time, the slide erased what used to be a farm road on the far side of the river — a road you could “drive a vehicle on.” Today, Henderson said, there is “absolutely no chance of that anymore at all.”

It’s all been washed away.

Irene, thousands of landslides and a shift in state policy

In the years after Irene, that eroding bank in Sandgate was just one of many.

“After Irene happened, landslides got started all over the state of Vermont,” Henderson recalled, wincing at the recollection. At the same time, he said, the state was reconsidering its approach to managing rivers that are increasingly hammered by intense rain.

A statewide “river corridor” initiative emerged, aimed at drawing lines back from streambanks and accepting that it is healthy for rivers to migrate over time. The idea is not just about flood control, but also about giving streams enough room to find what scientists call “natural equilibrium.”

“With the river corridor easements, it’s trying to give the river the space it needs to find natural equilibrium,” said Fetterman. “Rivers do migrate over time.”

That policy shift came with a hard truth for landowners living with unstable slopes.

“The Agency of Natural Resources decided we’re not going to stop landslides anymore,” Henderson said, citing both resource constraints and the new river corridor philosophy. “They just don’t have the money, the manpower — and because of new policies to try to stop them, my efforts of getting permits and a grant to do that work came to nothing.”

Instead of armoring the base of the slope — “putting a band‑aid on it,” as Fetterman described it — the state wanted to see projects that addressed the causes upstream: the channelized rivers, the human‑made berms and the flood plains cut off from high water.

That’s where Sandgate’s current work comes in.

Cutting holes in the berm, not fighting the river

Standing in a grassy field along the Green River, it’s easy to miss what has changed. The berm that once walled off the river from its flood plain is still visible in places — a low, rock‑studded rise along the field’s edge. But it is largely overgrown.

However, the machine work is obvious in two key spots.

“Up there was the first breach, and then this is the second one,” Fetterman said, pointing along the berm to where recent work has demolished it. “This was taller. We probably took 4 to 6 feet of height out of it.”

Inside that human‑made ridge, they found exactly what you’d expect from decades of ad hoc flood control. “It was mostly old river cobbles,” Fetterman said. “In most berms that we see, (they) are made just by the farmer picking rocks out of their field that were at one point deposited there by the river, and then stacking them up right next to the stream. Here, there was a lot of junk. And there’s chunks of concrete.”

Instead of scraping the entire berm down to ground level, the team strategically lowered it in places where the river wants to spread out during high flow periods.

“By cutting out sections of the berm under higher flows, it allows the river to spread out onto the flood plain,” Fetterman said. “We’re reconnecting where the river would have gone had the berm not been built.”

The goal is simple but counterintuitive: Invite the river back onto the field in controlled ways, so it can lose speed and drop sediment there, instead of continuing to hammer the base of the landslide and sending even more tons of gravel racing downstream.

“The big idea is that (the river) somewhat abandons this over time,” Fetterman said, gesturing toward the failing slope. Right now, as material sloughs off, he said, “every time we get a high flow event, the river just carries it downstream” rather than letting the toe build up and stabilize.

By reengaging old channels and historic “flood chutes,” the project aims to bleed off that energy before the river reaches the most vulnerable point, the base of the current landslide.

Trees, debris and the case for a messier river

The Sandgate work is not just about dirt and rock; it is also about what grows — and falls — along the river’s edge.

Over the next several years, project partners plan to plant more than 500 trees along this stretch of the Green River, extending roughly 50 feet back from the top of the bank in some places and tracing the full curve of a major bend.

“We’ll probably plant all the way out to where it starts to slope up, so 50 feet,” Henderson said, adding that the goal was to establish about 500-plus trees “on both sides of the river, but predominantly here.”

If the landscape were a work of art, the planting palette would be tailored to wet soils and areas of periodic flooding: sycamores and basswoods near the river, shrubby willows and dogwoods right along the bank, then silver and red maples, sugar maple, black cherry and oaks set farther back. Black walnuts, a favorite of both wildlife and woodworkers, will be tucked in as “investment trees” for the distant future.

“We specifically look to plant trees that would naturally grow in the flood plain,” Henderson said. “Trees that like wet soil and can handle being flooded.”

Downstream, where large trees are already toppling into the channel as the bank undercuts, Fetterman is quick to counter a common instinct to “clean up” the fallen wood. “People sometimes think of debris in the river as a bad thing,” he said. “But really, it helps slow down water.”

Standing together at the base of the landslide, beside a small drop where the river pours over a downed tree and into a deep pool, Fetterman described how that structure works.

“This is a great visualization of the ability for naturally recruited wood to dissipate energy,” he said. “You see, it’s kind of rapid. Then, it hits a spot and it’s able to release energy into a pool. So, instead of just flushing across a more consistent surface, it hits this break, releases energy down into a pool, and then it’s really slow coming out of it. So, you really want this diversity within a stream.”

As climate change drives more intense storms, that messy complexity — the woody debris, the side channels, the rough flood plains — is exactly what slows water down and spreads it out, reducing damage downstream.

“In instances like this, no infrastructure is at threat by a tree falling in here,” Fetterman said. “So then, it actually helps engage the flood plain, helps slow down water and promotes flow out onto the flood plain.”

Why flooded fields can be advantageous

For generations, farmers along Vermont rivers have responded to flooding with understandable instincts. They push the water away from crops, push rocks back toward the river, and mow right up to the banks.

The Sandgate team is trying to show that, in an era with storms of increased strength, working with the river may offer more durable benefits, even for agriculture.

“Even for farmers, the reason that a lot of farmers have really successful crops grown in a flood plain is because of the nutrients in those soils,” Fetterman said. “Even though there’s negatives to that field flooding for them, the positives would be that that river is bringing in nutrients that will sustain those crops instead of the man‑made fertilizers that are put on crops.”

“It’s a natural fertilizer produced by the river,” he added, “and organic material that it transports that is then able to make those soils so fertile.”

That doesn’t mean that the trade‑offs are easy. Letting water reclaim pieces of field “requires them to be far more adaptable in their farming practices,” Fetterman acknowledged. But, he argued, “it is better overall for the entire environment, including the food we eat.”

Conservation, ownership, funding and a long view

The Sandgate property itself has changed hands as Vermont’s conservation landscape has evolved since Irene.

The original family sold to a private owner, who later sold hundreds of acres — essentially everything but the house — to The Conservation Fund. From there, the land went to the Monarch Foundation, which now owns both sides of the river at the critical “choke point” where the project is focused.

“The Conservation Fund sold it to the Monarch Foundation,” Henderson said. “They’ve been very supportive” and have “endorsed this project to happen.”

On the Green River site, the Monarch Foundation has allowed the berm breaches and extensive tree planting. An adjacent landowner on the opposite bank has agreed to a more modest buffer, after some early miscommunication led to newly planted trees being mowed — twice.

“They are participating, just not to the extent that we would like,” Henderson said.

Funding for the design and implementation of the Sandgate project was provided by Watersheds United Vermont through the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation’s Clean Water Initiative Program.

From start to finish, many partners have been involved in the project’s development and eventual implementation. These include the Batten Kill Watershed Alliance, the town of Sandgate, the Southwestern Vermont Chapter of Trout Unlimited, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, the Fish & Wildlife Department, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bennington County Conservation District and landowners (currently the Monarch Foundation).

From Irene to what comes next

In Sandgate, the work along the Green River is one piece of a more broad post‑Irene effort to rethink how Vermont lives in harmony with its rivers.

The same partners are currently preparing a similar bank stabilization and flood plain reconnection project nearby, in Sunderland, and in cooperation with Ducks Unlimited. This Sunderland project will address a collapsing hayfield bank along the Batten Kill and the Batten Kill tributary known as Tanner Brook. Work there is expected to begin after Labor Day, with more tree and buffer planting to follow.

Meanwhile, the Batten Kill Watershed Alliance — which grew out of local resistance to restocking Vermont’s stretch of the Batten Kill with hatchery trout in the 1990s — continues to argue that restoring natural habitat and shade is a better long‑term strategy than pouring more fish into a stressed system.

“The main reason why the Batten Kill Watershed Alliance got created was to prevent stocking the Batten Kill in Vermont again,” Henderson said, arguing that the river “has all the elements of being a natural, self‑sustaining population” — if habitat is protected and repaired.

Fifteen years after Irene, the Sandgate project reflects that same philosophy on the land: Stop trying to pin rivers in place, and instead help them behave like rivers again, even when that means there will be an adjustment period.

Watching a 220‑foot slope slowly crumble does not seem natural, but it was the human-made berms that created the problem and helped to identify it. It is difficult to place trust in change, but those carefully cut berms and young sycamores will, in time, make things more stable, not less.

As Fetterman said while looking up at the loose gravel wall above the Green River, the height itself is “one of those sort of illusions.”

“It looks like it’s higher than it might actually be, when you’re standing close by,” he said.

But the deeper illusion might be what the Sandgate project suggests: the idea that we can hold rivers still in an era of highly variable and transitioning weather patterns, and that the safest place for high water is anywhere but the flood plain.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Letting the river roam: Surveying the scars left by Irene 15 years later .

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