BRIDGEWATER — Andy Reid was standing at the back entrance of Ramunto’s Brick & Brew Pizza, the restaurant he owns with his wife, in a muddied, silted parking lot a few paces away from the Ottauquechee River during a brief break in Friday’s morning rain.
“You see the dumpster over there?” he said, nodding of his head in the direction of a green metal bin behind him. “It weighs more than a 1,000 pounds and was bobbing in the water like a cork.”
That is how Reid described the power of the overflowing Ottauquechee 11 days earlier, pulling out his phone to show a video of the floodwaters gushing like a waterfall into the basement of the historic Bridgewater Mill building, a sprawling former woolen mill towering alongside Route 4 and home to a colony of artists and craftsman studios, his pizza restaurant and the ShackeltonThomas furniture and pottery workshops.
“We’re waiting on cleanup. Fortunately, nobody got hurt….
