For weeks, Vermont officials have been urging residents to call 211 to report damage from this month’s historic flooding. The hotline is crucial for both documenting the extent of flood damage and connecting people with resources they desperately need to recover, officials said.
But in recent days, there’s been growing criticism about the 211 system, which is operated by United Ways of Vermont under a contract with the state. The hotline was quickly overwhelmed by the disaster.
Meanwhile, data from the system — including specific details about damages to homes, phone numbers and whether residents wanted volunteer help — were being shared with dozens of disaster relief organizations, including faith-based groups, that descended on the state after the storm. Yet some cities, towns and local volunteers were not dialed in to what their neighbors reported.
“I have communicated my frustrations with the 211 system to the administration and to the United Way,” Rep. Jonathan Williams (D-Barre) told fellow lawmakers during a debriefing at the Statehouse last Thursday. “My hope is we can make it better for the future.”
Since 2005, Vermont 211 has acted as a centralized call center that helps people get information about a range of community services, including housing assistance, mental health treatment, job training, and access to food, transportation and legal services. In the immediate aftermath of 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont 211’s phone lines at its Essex Junction call center were also overwhelmed. But the service was able to add lines and volunteers to help it field more than 15,000 calls for assistance, according to Elizabeth Gilman, executive director of United Ways of Vermont.
“When you don’t invest in a system and then something like this happens, this is the result — we are going to get inundated.” Elizabeth Gilman
For much of its history, the system operated 24-7. But in mid-June, United Ways announced that it was scaling back the call center’s hours in response to a change in its contract with the state. Starting July 1, the phones were to be staffed from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Ten days later, storms began dropping more than nine inches of rain on some parts of the state, and 211 was soon overwhelmed by calls. Vermont 211 staff, who have worked remotely since the pandemic, documented damage reported by residents, told them how to reach the Federal Emergency Management Agency and volunteer groups, and shared data with emergency management officials. Immediate help wasn’t often available, however.
“I have heard from a very large number of constituents that they have not been able to get through to 211,” Rep. Williams said last Thursday. Instead of reaching a live person, some flood victims were told to leave messages or to text or email for help, Williams said. That can be a challenge “if people don’t have email or computers” following a flood, he noted.
Such delays are unacceptable when people are in need, said Rep. Mike Marcotte (R-Newport), chair of the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development.
“That’s a problem that we’ve got to fix,” he told colleagues.
Emergency management officials say they have. The 211 system backlog has been resolved, according to Daniel Batsie, deputy commissioner of the Department of Public Safety. The “massive outpouring of contacts” to 211 after the floods made it difficult at times for people to reach a person, he acknowledged.
But the last call backlog was on July 22, when 86 calls or online requests for service awaited replies, he said. Officials from the State Emergency Operations Center pitched in to return calls and were able to clear the backlog by the end of the day, he said.
As of last week, the call center had received 4,290 calls reporting flood damage to homes, according to data provided by state officials. More than a third, 1,596, were in Washington County, which also had the most homes in the state reported as uninhabitable — 359. Lamoille County had 181 homes reported as uninhabitable, and Windsor County had 68. A total of 314 people said they needed shelter.
Gilman, the United Ways of Vermont executive director, acknowledged that the 211 system was overwhelmed after the storm hit. Her team of seven remote call takers — down from nine before July 1 — immediately shifted back to 24-hour staffing but couldn’t keep up with the call volume.
At the worst point, the backlog of unanswered messages from flood victims reached 300. It took workers two days or more to respond, she said.
“We were inundated. We just had hundreds of calls in a very short period of time, and we did fall behind,” Gilman said.
To get back on track, the organization added a page on the 211 website on which residents could self-report their damages and enlisted five AmeriCorps workers and 10 United Ways volunteers from New Hampshire to pitch in.
Asked on Tuesday about 211’s performance after the flood, Gov. Phil Scott said the state initially wasn’t aware of just how bad the backlog had become.
“We can’t fix a problem unless we know about it,” he said.
The emergency managers “weren’t given that information” from 211 officials, but once they became aware, they stepped in and “rectified” the backlog, Scott said.
“I don’t believe it was a funding issue. It was a communication issue,” he said.
Among the towns reporting communication issues was Waterbury, which didn’t receive any significant 211 data until July 22 — a week and a half after the flooding. And even then, no one at the town noticed the email.
“It simply got lost in the shuffle at the time,” municipal manager Tom Leitz said.
Mark Bosma, public information officer for Vermont Emergency Management, said officials were initially sorting 211 reports by hand and directing the information to the hardest-hit areas beginning on July 16. Waterbury got a handful that day and then a fuller accounting on July 28, after the system was automated.
The latest update showed that residents had made 97 requests for help, including for electrical work, cleanup and mold mitigation. Leitz said he hoped those who asked for help got it through the town’s existing volunteer network, but he couldn’t be sure until the lists were cross-checked.
“I think the challenge in any disaster like this is always information sharing,” Leitz said.
Much of the information collected by 211, including respondents’ names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, has been made available to about two dozen volunteer organizations that are operating in Vermont. The groups are using Crisis Cleanup, a website and app that help coordinate volunteer efforts in disaster zones.
Waterbury officials weren’t even aware of the Crisis Cleanup app, according to Liz Schlegel, the head of the town’s volunteer response. She only learned about it last Thursday.
“If this is the app that the state wants everyone to be using, why didn’t they tell anybody about it?” Schlegel said.
The state and Crisis Cleanup founder and executive director Aaron Titus said he could not provide a list of aid groups that are using the app in Vermont and have access to flood victims’ information. There is a list of organizations that signed up for the overall disaster — which affected several states — but it is “difficult to separate out that list geographically,” he said.
One with a large presence in Vermont is Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based evangelical Christian organization led by president and CEO Franklin Graham, son of preacher Billy Graham. Using information provided to 211, the group called a Seven Days reporter whose basement had flooded. The caller asked if she needed help or wanted to pray.
The organization’s local program manager, John Schultz, said he couldn’t speak to the specifics of that call but said it is in line with the group’s mission. Volunteers reach out to see what people need and often send chaplains along with work crews.
“They are here to listen to people, pray with them if they’d like to and spend time helping people cope with the trauma of what they may have gone through,” Schultz explained.
He said his volunteers had helped about 30 families “muck out” their homes within a 30-mile radius of Barre.
The group has received referrals from 211 through the Crisis Cleanup website. It also has set up its own hotline and has connected with people outside Faith Community Church in Barre, where the group has a colorful trailer emblazoned with its name and “Helping in Jesus’ Name.”
The organization is proud of its dual role of helping people recover physically from disasters while ministering to their spiritual needs.
“We do want to make sure that folks know that they are not forgotten and that God does love them [and] they are not alone,” Schultz said.
Titus, Crisis Cleanup’s executive director, said the company only gives information to reputable aid organizations that have a physical presence in the state to perform disaster relief work.
He is sensitive to people’s privacy concerns and only gives groups the data they need to respond to each incident, such as names, addresses and contact information. When respondents contact 211, the service asks them whether they want to hear from volunteer groups.
About two dozen disaster relief organizations working in Vermont are using the company’s platform to provide flood relief, and all are providing services to flood victims for free, Titus said.
A FEMA official recommended that state officials use Crisis Cleanup, and the state agreed to pay for Titus to spend three weeks in Vermont, he said. It’s not clear how much the State of Vermont is paying for the company’s services.
Titus, an attorney and disaster preparedness specialist, said his company’s goal is to help communities better coordinate volunteer efforts after disasters. Without such coordination, relief groups and media tend to flock to the worst-hit areas, while other areas struggle in comparative obscurity.
“If I can help more volunteers help more people, that’s my mission,” Titus said.
Amanda Gustin, a volunteer coordinator for the City of Barre, said she likes the idea of a single number for people to call after a disaster and said the app appears well designed. But the way the 211 data was shared with communities created confusion for volunteers on the ground, she said. She also disputed the idea that personal information is not shared, noting that she’s seen some flood victims’ medical information.
Flood victims’ information was “dumped” into the Crisis Cleanup platform, making it hard for volunteers to tell the status of various requests for assistance, she said.
Gustin hopes the 211 data helped the state document flood damage for federal officials, but she thinks the hotline fell short in what should have been its primary mission.
Lawmakers and flood victims are right to be critical of the delays, said Gilman, the United Ways executive director, adding that 211 has been “battling for funding” from the state for six years. “When you don’t invest in a system and then something like this happens, this is the result — we are going to get inundated,” Gilman said.
Marcotte told Seven Days that lawmakers bear some of the responsibility for the funding that resulted in the staffing cut at 211. “We didn’t fully appropriate the funds that we probably should have, in hindsight,” he said.
Being able to immediately bring on additional paid staff or volunteers to handle skyrocketing call volumes is crucial for disasters, but the state and 211 had no plan for how to do that, Gilman said.
“There isn’t the funding and the planning in place to expand quickly when something like this happens,” she said.
The service’s website, however, touts its ability to do just that.
“Vermont 211 is prepared for optimum operation during an emergency through advance preparation, flexibility, and preparedness drills to respond to sustained spikes in call volume and rapidly changing information that is hard to collect but which must be managed and disseminated,” the site states.
Gilman said it’s important for people to remember that thousands of residents received assistance through a complex disaster response system of which 211 is just a part. But she agreed that the state and 211 needed to learn lessons from this disaster in order to improve their response to future ones.
“We can’t have these things not work for Vermonters, especially in such an awful moment in people’s lives,” she said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Wrong Number? | Vermont 211 struggled to keep up with a deluge of flood calls”
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2023.
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