Flood Zones in Chittenden County, Vermont: Richmond and Jonesville

Three floods in about twelve months: July 2023, December 2023, July 2024

On July 10-11, 2023, sustained heavy rainfall drove the Winooski River out of its banks in Richmond, flooding Volunteers Green and Bridge Street, prompting home evacuations and the closure of Richmond's town offices; a nearby restaurant's outdoor garden and biergarten area were washed out. Barely five months later, on December 18-19, 2023, a major snowmelt-and-rain event pushed the Winooski to its third-highest flood crest on record at that time -- roughly two feet below the July 2023 crest and about six feet below the historic Tropical Storm Irene flood of 2011 -- again flooding Volunteers Green, with state swift-water rescue teams making a dozen rescues regionally. Then, in July 2024, remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl brought the Winooski over its banks in Richmond for a third time within about a year, again inundating Volunteers Green, part of a broader statewide event that led to more than 100 rescues and at least two deaths.

That three-times-in-a-year pattern, all centered on the same specific stretch of Richmond's village center, is what makes this a genuinely distinctive, well-documented local fact pattern rather than a single flood year to note and move past. Flooding also affected the broader Winooski corridor through this county during these events -- Route 2 between Bolton and Williston, and Route 117 between Richmond and Essex, both saw modeled or actual overtopping, and the village of Jonesville (upstream of Richmond, in the town of Bolton) dealt with its own flood impacts along the same stretch of river during the 2023 and 2024 events.

An active local response: buyout guidance and a dedicated flood-mitigation meeting

Richmond's town government has responded with a real, ongoing process rather than treating each event as a one-off. The town's own website publishes guidance for property owners on FEMA's Buyout, Elevation, and Relocation programs, directing interested owners to the Town Manager's office to start that process -- and Richmond held a Special Selectboard meeting specifically on flooding mitigation on December 3, 2024, formally taking up the question of how the town should respond to the repeated flooding on a longer-term basis. That sits inside a broader statewide effort: Vermont Emergency Management's voluntary buyout/acquisition program (using FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funds) had roughly 295 active applications from 67 communities statewide as of late 2024, with as much as $50 million in potential FEMA buyout funding under discussion -- and, as reporting on other Vermont towns has shown, local approval of a specific buyout is a town-level decision, not an automatic FEMA determination, so a Richmond-area property's actual buyout eligibility and status is something to confirm with the town directly rather than assume.

How this differs from -- and relates to -- Washington County's flood story on the same river

Montpelier and Barre, covered in our Washington County flood-zones page, sit further upstream on the same Winooski River and had their own, separately documented catastrophic floods in July 2023 and July 2024, with their own FEMA disaster designations and their own buyout activity. Richmond's flood history is not the same event repackaged -- it's a distinct downstream reach of the same river system with its own three-event pattern (including the December 2023 flood, which hit Richmond significantly but was not the headline Montpelier/Barre story), its own specific place names (Volunteers Green, Bridge Street), and its own town-level mitigation process. If you're evaluating land anywhere along this county's stretch of the Winooski -- Richmond, Jonesville, or nearby -- treat it as its own documented flood-risk case, not an assumption carried over from what you may have read about Montpelier or Barre.

What to check before buying a Richmond- or Jonesville-area parcel

1. Pull FEMA's current Special Flood Hazard Area map for the specific parcel, and separately check it against Vermont's own River Corridor map on the state's Natural Resources Atlas -- a parcel outside the FEMA floodplain can still sit inside the state's mapped river corridor.
2. Ask the Town of Richmond directly whether the specific property flooded in July 2023, December 2023, or July 2024, and whether it is part of, or under consideration for, any FEMA buyout, elevation, or relocation application.
3. If evaluating a parcel in the village center near Volunteers Green or Bridge Street specifically, treat repeated flooding as an established pattern rather than a one-time event when assessing insurance, financing, and rebuild feasibility.
4. Confirm current flood-insurance availability and likely premium directly -- a property with three flood events in roughly a year is a materially different underwriting case than a similar property with no recent flood history.
5. For any new construction or substantial improvement, confirm both Richmond's own flood-hazard zoning provisions and whether a separate Vermont DEC river-corridor or floodplain permit applies in addition to the town permit.