On the last weekend of August 2011, Stephen Farrington of Stockbridge took his family to stay at his parents’ house in Burlington ahead of Tropical Storm Irene. At the time, his major concern was the forecast of high winds, which threatened to topple the large pines that surround his house on the White River.
Once the storm had passed, Farrington and his family headed for home. They made it only as far as Tozier’s Restaurant, on Route 107 in Bethel. Beyond that, he said, “The road was just gone.” Cut off entirely by washed-out highways and bridges, Stockbridge had become an island.
Farrington hiked the last seven miles to his house alone, then spent the next week with other volunteers trying to reach people who were stranded in the hills and accessible only by ATVs or helicopters. Many were seniors who had lost power and didn’t have enough food, water or medication on hand. Farrington’s house survived the storm, but several of his friends and neighbors lost theirs, including one couple who fled their home just 20 minutes before floodwaters swept it away.
From then on, Farrington, a civil engineer and hydrologist by training, began diligently watching data available online from the U.S. Geological Survey’s nearby stream-gauging stations, such as those in the White River in West Hartford and Ayers Brook in Randolph. He could interpret those readings, he realized, but the average person could not. So he set out to create a user-friendly smartphone app that would notify the public about rising waters near their homes and businesses before they reached critical flood stage.
The result: RiverAware, an app released in January that lets users set alerts for bodies of water near them and their family and friends, as well as properties they’re concerned about anywhere in the country. Ordinary citizens, first responders, floodplain managers, scientists, and recreational users such as paddlers and anglers can get real-time river-flow data, then share it with others.
The app’s release comes at a critical time in flood preparedness. This month marks the anniversaries of the catastrophic flooding that hit Vermont in July 2023 and 2024. In all, the storms killed four people, forced the rescue or evacuation of hundreds of Vermonters, and caused more than $1 billion in damage. Climate scientists warn that such extreme weather events will only get more frequent and intense.
Yet the real-time reports that make RiverAware’s early warning system possible may be in jeopardy. The app relies on aggregated data from more than 13,000 stream-gauging stations around the country, which are maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Weather Service. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Department of Government Efficiency proposed cutting more than half a billion dollars from the U.S. Geological Survey’s 2026 budget. If the cuts get approved, the fate of those stations, and the app, could be at risk.
“If you want all that data in one place,” Farrington said, “it’s just not available anywhere else.”
A 60-year-old South Burlington native, Farrington has spent years solving water- and climate-related problems. He founded Transcend Engineering in 2009, initially to develop sensing instruments for boreholes deep in the ocean floor. At the time, he was working with the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography and Ocean Networks Canada to install instruments that measure methane releases in the North Pacific and Arctic oceans. The greenhouse gas is of particular concern to climate scientists, as it’s more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Transcend Engineering, which now has nine employees and is based in Bethel, also develops soil moisture sensors that are used by farmers to know exactly when and how much to irrigate, as well as by meteorologists, who use them to create more accurate weather forecasting models. As Farrington put it, “We get involved with issues of too much water and too little water.”
One of the goals of RiverAware is to educate the public about the watersheds they live in. The app provides easy-to-read graphs and explanations of current river conditions, historical data going back three months, and color-coded flood-severity levels. Users can set customized alerts for rivers and streams near them, which they can share instantly with friends, family and community members via text, email and social media. The app has both free and premium versions, the latter of which allows users to set unlimited alerts and watch-list stations. It costs $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year.
When Transcend Engineering first released RiverAware, the app’s designers assumed their user base would be primarily homeowners, farmers, first responders, and others responsible for protecting lives and property. But as RiverAware has grown in popularity — as of June, it had been downloaded more than 1,500 times — they’ve heard from other users who work in outdoor recreation, such as river guides, as well as professionals who spend a lot of time in and around moving water.
RiverAware is “super easy and user friendly and a great resource for Vermonters,” said Karina Dailey, a restoration ecologist with the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
“It gives you a sense of what rivers are going to be blown out when.” Karina Dailey
Dailey, who manages VNRC’s program focused on removing derelict dams, previously used the U.S. Geological Survey’s website in her job, largely because she’s accustomed to reading hydrological graphs.
“But this app does give quicker access to those gauges and lets you do that work faster,” she said. “For fishing, it gives you a sense of what rivers are going to be blown out when and how murky the waters are going to be.”
Mike Cannon, who works as urban search and rescue program coordinator for the Vermont Department of Public Safety, said he recently switched to RiverAware after an app he had used for years was discontinued.
Cannon, who is also a member of Colchester Technical Rescue, has since set up alerts for gauges on the Mad River in Waitsfield and the Winooski River in Waterbury and Essex, all of which are prone to flooding.
“It’s my job to keep track of this stuff,” he said. “I’m not on that [app] every day, but when it’s raining and we’re out in the field … it’s easy to just flip that app open and see stuff. That’ll generally get me a feel for what the watershed is doing.”
Indeed, RiverAware is trying to help users develop a “more intuitive understanding” of the waterways that are all around them, said Emily Ellert, Transcend Engineering’s digital strategies manager. Ellert moved to Pittsfield from Brooklyn in July 2023, just as the floods were occurring. The day she closed on her house, she had to constantly check a map to find ways of circumventing the washed-out roads.
“That was quite an introduction to my time in Vermont,” she said.
One challenge of making RiverAware more usable for Vermonters, Ellert explained, is the fact that the state doesn’t have many gauging stations overall. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Vermont has 52 real-time stream gauges and five lake and reservoir gauges, spread across 7,100 miles of river. All are maintained by a crew of nine who cover all of Vermont and New Hampshire.
And many of the gauges that are in Vermont’s rivers and streams don’t indicate when the river or stream has hit flood stage. This is true not only in Vermont but also in sparsely populated areas all around the country. For this reason, Transcend Engineering is developing its own custom metrics, so that when people see a nearby river or stream has risen above a certain level, they know it’s time to take action.
For now, Farrington is also keeping a close eye on another looming threat: budget cuts to the federal agencies that provide the data. While he doesn’t expect that the gauges themselves will be shut off, he said, “The biggest concern is the unpredictability of it, because a lot of things are being cut without notice or any public comment.” After a couple of “scares” when the team had trouble pulling data out of the cloud and into the app, Transcend signed a deal with a third-party data aggregator that has access to that information.
In the meantime, Transcend Engineering plans to add more supplemental features in the future, such as enabling users to upload photos and videos. Farrington said he also envisions the app including hourly flood predictions. In January, he submitted a grant proposal to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop such forecast models, particularly for underserved rural areas such as Vermont.
“We’re entering a phase in our society where it’s going to be more incumbent on people to look out for each other,” Farrington said, “and we’re trying to provide the tools to do that.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Going With the Flow | A new app developed in Tropical Storm Irene’s aftermath alerts users to rising rivers and streams before they flood”
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.
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