State officials say Caledonia County appears to have suffered the worst damage from Thursday’s flash floods. And nowhere took a harder beating than the small town of Sutton, where multiple homes were severely damaged or destroyed.
As of Friday morning, roughly 20 homes remained cut off from road access, according to Kyle Seymour, the town fire chief.
The storm also wreaked havoc on Sutton’s roads, culverts and ditches — after the town had spent millions on repairs from the previous years’ flooding.
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Michelle Tanner lives in the lone property on Sutton Hollow Road. She didn’t realize the Calendar Brook had leapt its banks until she got ready to leave the house at about 3 p.m. Thursday to do her afternoon farm chores.
“And then I looked out the window and I’m like, holy [crap], we’re flooding,” Tanner said in her silt-covered lawn Friday morning. “And I called my husband and told him to get his butt home. And he couldn’t believe it because it wasn’t raining in Lyndonville.”
With her stepson’s help, Tanner evacuated through waist-deep water to higher ground. By then, she said, the brook was roaring past all sides of their yellow ranch. It had also inundated the barn that houses her and husband’s cattle and Shetland ponies.
Volunteers worked overnight to help move the animals to safety. A fleet of earth-moving equipment arrived Friday morning to begin removing large piles of silt and repair the mangled driveway.
Tanner said she has no idea how much damage the flood has done to the home they’ve lived in for 25 years.
“It is horrible to realize that you got so many years into it, and it just can be gone,” Tanner said. “But I’m thankful that everyone is safe. You know, the animals and us, so that’s all that really matters.”
The Tanners’ home is one of several that got overtaken by the Calendar Brook Thursday.
Kayla Gray, 32, has lived in the “tight-knit” neighborhood since she was in fourth grade.
“I’m related to half of the town,” she joked Friday.
Gray, whose Calendar Brook Road home basement flooded Thursday, said the neighborhood had been living peaceably with its namesake river until the first flood hit, in the summer of 2023.
Thursday’s event, she said, is by far the worst.
“Never seen anything like this. I’ve seen floods here before — this yard always gets hit. But I’ve never seen anything on this stretch this bad,” Gray said.
Gray said family members from Lyndon stopped by to check on her Friday morning — the same family members whose home, on Red Village Road, was destroyed by flooding last summer.
Karen Degreenia’s two-story brown home is situated about 20 yards from the Calendar Brook. She and her husband evacuated when a fire department crew told her it was time to leave Thursday afternoon.
“I honestly thought this half of the house was toast,” she said.
Though the yard is an absolute mess, she said there’s surprisingly minimal damage to the structure. That’s welcome news since she and her husband are still trying to repair flood damage they experienced in July of 2024.
“It’s a small town, so we do what we can, but it’s definitely getting a little old at this point,” Degreenia said.
Lexi Krupp contributed reporting.
