Description
The Barre Municipal Auditorium is usually a hive of activity in the spring, with school basketball tournaments, concerts, conventions, and other activities. It has been still and quiet this year. In late March, Governor Phil Scott announced that it would be one of three surge locations prepared by the National Guard to receive additional patients in the event that the hospital system was overwhelmed. The Auditorium would take overflow patients from the Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, just a few miles away.
I walk my dog past the Auditorium almost every day, and I can see it from my house. Seeing it empty and quiet is eerie, and imagining all those waiting hospital cots inside is even more eerie.