Flagpole installation acrossVermont

Flagpoles in Vermont

Town greens, college and hospital campuses, state buildings and a great deal of open hillside in between. Pole, foundation, flag and labour on one quote, with the footing carried down to the depth Vermont's own code asks for.

Wind here. Wind is not what decides a pole in Vermont. The mapped figure hardly moves across the state: roughly 105 mph over most of it, edging to about 110 mph along the Massachusetts line, and that is the whole range. Two other things decide the job instead. The first is the code, which is a state matter here. The Division of Fire Safety administers the Vermont Fire and Building Safety Code, now on the 2021 International Building Code, and it amends that code twice in ways a flagpole feels: the national ground snow map is thrown out in favour of a table of ground snow loads for Vermont by town, with anything above 2,500 ft settled site by site instead, and a footing has to reach below the local frost line and in no case less than 5 ft below finished grade. The second is what the auger meets on the way down. Ledge under one town, soft clay under the next, and a short season in which to dig either. Mountainous ground and the gaps through it get looked at address by address rather than read off a contour. Zoning and design review stay with the town.

• The Champlain Valley — Around 105 mph from Burlington north to the Canadian line, the gentlest sizing in the state. Standard wall is normally right, so the money goes into height and finish rather than shaft thickness. The soft grey clay the Champlain Sea left behind is what the footing gets designed for, and lake frontage is treated as open ground whatever the contour says.
• The Green Mountains and the Northeast Kingdom — The same printed figure as the valley floor, which is the least useful thing you can know about a notch or a ridge top, so those are sized one address at a time. It is the cold end of the state as well: frost deepest, digging season shortest, and above 2,500 ft the ground snow figure has to be settled for the site rather than taken from the state table. Ice on the rope and pulley does more over a winter here than wind does.
• The Vermont Valley and the west — Bennington up through Rutland to Brandon, 105 to 110 mph with the higher end down at the Bennington corner, and the air is not the interesting part. This is marble and limestone country under thin soil, so ledge can turn up two feet down. On those sites the hole decides what the job costs, not the pole.
• The Connecticut River valley and the southeast — About 110 mph from White River Junction down to Brattleboro, the top of the Vermont range and still a moderate figure. The valley runs straight north and south with little upwind shelter, so an open site in it is sized for what is actually around it. Snow here gets ploughed into piles and left standing, which decides the spot as often as the sightline does.

Flying the Vermont flag? We sell it, sewn to the state's own design specification and sized to sit under the national flag on your pole. See the Vermont flag →