BERLIN, Vt.—More than two months after the remnants of Hurricane Irene inundated Vermont, the bucket of an excavator ripped through one end of a flood-damaged mobile home on Monday as contractors started to demolish and remove the remaining trailers destroyed by the storm.
But officials said asbestos removal from some homes has increased the cost of the cleanup, and more fundraising is needed to do the work at no cost to homeowners.
"The good news is that we started," said Lt. Gov. Phil Scott of the work that began Monday at Weston's Mobile Home Park in Berlin, which was heavily damaged by flooding. "We've had some struggles along the way, a few challenges, but one of them being we encountered some asbestos in some of the units. That was unanticipated."
Of the 20 units being removed over the next two weeks from Weston's, where flooding damaged 70 trailers, five contain asbestos, which will require costly removal.
Scott had helped work out a deal with Associated General Contractors of Vermont to reduce the cost to $1,500 per trailer. But when a mobile home owners group complained that they could not afford that on top of the new housing costs they were paying, the state decided to cover the cost from funds raised from private donors.
A total of $156,000 has been raised, but more is needed, officials said Monday.
The cost per unit increased from $1,500 to as much as $4,000 for a unit with asbestos, said Chris Graff, a member of the Vermont Long Term Disaster Recovery Group, which is administering the disaster relief fund.
"We have to raise a lot more money, not just for this project but for every unmet need out there," Graff said. "The mobile homes are just a very small part of the very big picture of disaster need that's out there."
After Weston's, the project hopefully will move on to mobile home parks in Duxbury and Woodstock, said Scott, who estimated that about 100 mobile homes in the state need to be removed.
Of the 70 damaged mobile homes in Berlin, some of the owners planned for them to be removed, fixed up, sold or given away, officials said.
