If you listened closely, you could hear how wet Vermont got last week.

When much of the state was inundated with catastrophic flooding.

Online you'll find video after video of water rushing through neighborhoods, destroying

the asphalt, bobbing around cars and trucks.

This is a street in Ludlow, Vermont.

The road looks like a river, and it sounds like the ocean.

This is a very simple way of saying it, but there's too much water.

Anna Weber is a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

It's overflowing river banks, overflowing the streams and the creeks.

And no matter how many times I see pictures like that, it affects me the same way every

time.

How?

It's unimaginable, right?

Anna doesn't call the flooding that happened in Vermont a natural disaster.

She actually hates that description.

The hurricane or a flood on its own is not a disaster.

That's what we would call a natural hazard.

A disaster happens when there are people in harm's way of that hazard and when they're

vulnerable to its effects.

And that's a decision that we make.

As people, we're the ones who decide who lives in vulnerable areas, who has the resources

to cope with the effects of extreme weather and things like that.

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