St. Albans Steps Up for Irene Recovery

On Thursday I spent the morning in a loaned box truck. On any normal weekday, it's filled with windows and other building supplies and sent around the region to deliver wares to paying customers. Not on this day. On this day the truck wasn’t going to make its owner, John Bonnette of Bonnette Supply, any money. Instead, he donated the truck and a driver to help pick up and deliver recovery supplies to Northfield.

As the rain poured down, we headed out.

We stopped at Handy Toyota, where they had been collecting for nearly two weeks, and filled a brand-new pickup on the showroom floor with food and cleaning products. When we arrived, all of the employees stopped what they were doing, picked up boxes and ventured out into the rain to help load the truck.

We stopped at Ace Hardware, where they had collected donations and purchased over $3,000 worth of dust masks, shovels, gloves, garbage bags and other things you'd need if your town had been ravaged by a tropical storm.

We stopped at the Collins Perley Sports Center, where only six days earlier The Hartford High School football team - the same team that beat our Bobwhites in last year’s State Championship and again that Friday night - left with a school bus full of St. Albans' generosity and headed home to a community that had been devastated by Irene.

Nearly a dozen other local businesses had brought donations they'd gathered to the Complex. The largest of those contributions came from the People's Trust Company, which had collected at all of its locations in Franklin County over the last two weeks.

In Burlington we stopped at Christ the King School, where I was met by a group of middle school students, eager to load the truck with the things they had proudly collected for people and places they didn’t know much about - but just like our students in St. Albans, they had been asked to help and that was enough.

When we arrived at the Northfield Food Shelf, I was introduced to volunteers who had been waging war against the terrible effects of a natural disaster for nearly a month. They were tired, exhausted from the most essential endeavor: survival. Even so, the head of the food shelf informed me that they were going to donate some of what we brought down to Hardwick, where the food shelf had been nearly emptied earlier in the week. "They need it just a little more than we do," he said.

I want to thank our community for committing itself over the last few weeks to ensuring that those Vermonters who need our help received it. The donations we collected from our schools and businesses have benefited the towns of Northfield, Hardwick, Hartford and Waterbury. These items will help to make the ongoing recovery efforts there just a little easier and more comfortable.

Tropical Storm Irene washed out roads and bridges. It damaged homes and family farms. But no disaster can damage the enduring spirit of Vermonters.

Rep. Dustin A. Degree
St. Albans City