1 year after Sandy, recovery moves slowly on Connecticut shore

Source: New Haven Register, Conn.迷你倉Oct. 27--One year after Superstorm Sandy's surge rolled in on the heels of Tropical Storm Irene's fury a year earlier, recovery is far from complete.But not everyone is waiting for government to come up with ways to protect coastal residents and properties so we don't get whacked as bad by the next big storm as we did by Irene and Sandy.Any really big solutions to the wave and flood damage that rocked us in Irene and Sandy, to the extent that there are solutions, could take years, officials say.But take a spin around the neighborhoods off East Broadway in Milford or Cosey Beach Avenue in East Haven or coastal areas of Branford, Old Lyme or Fairfield, to name a few.You see plenty of houses up on pilings -- sometimes two or three in a row -- in the process of being raised above flood levels.You still hear the sound of hammers and saws as construction crews and, in some cases, the homeowners themselves continue to replace rotted drywall and wind-whipped siding.Work is going on everywhere.In Milford, which took some of the worst damage from Sandy on Oct. 29, 2012, almost every house where work is buzzing is in close proximity both to homes that saw no damage and others that are abandoned or in limbo because residents are still wrangling with insurance companies or just don't have the money to fix them.Many residents are still paying rent or staying with loved ones elsewhere as they wait to get back into their wrecked homes."You and I, we can go home, take our shoes off, read the paper and watch the news," said Bill Richards, Milford's deputy director of emergency management and recovery coordinator. "A lot of these people can't do that. They're living on top of relatives" or still staying somewhere temporarily, he said."We literally have streets where every house on the street is unoccupied," Richards said.Assistant City Planner Emmeline Harrigan said Milford has issued close to 65 permits for a combination of elevation and reconstruction "and we have 250 structures that were damaged" by the storm."It's the price of living down here," said James Street resident Fred "Chip" Monk, who did comparatively well in his 2002 house, which had nothing more than a garage and a wood shop on the first floor, along with plenty of soggy drywall that had to be replaced.In the wake of the Irene-Sandy double whammy, Monk is doing everything he can to rebuild with the next flood in mind -- with anything important upstairs. Irene had hit Aug. 28, 2011."Next time there is a big storm, I'm going to raise the garage door and go upstairs and go to sleep," Monk said.After months of work, he is just a couple of weeks away from finishing. But a house directly across the street from him is up on temporary wooden pilings. Another one a few doors down should also be raised. But the owner can't afford to do that work, Monk said. Meanwhile, several damaged houses down near the end of the street look as if they've barely been touched since the storm.Monk estimated that his street was 40 percent occupied.While no exact figures are available for displaced families, Richards said the city of Milford recently sent out 525 "repetitive loss" letters to homeowners covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Flood Insurance Program and "as of yesterday, 80 were returned to us by the post office because nobody lives in the houses."People get insurance money to repair their homes but you can't repair your home until you elevate it," Richards said. "The insurance doesn't pay to elevate your home."Several residents said the cost to elevate a house can run $70,000 to $80,000.But some problems are far beyond even that cost and aren't possible for one homeowner to fix, even if they're not universal enough for government to pay for.So when residents of East Haven's Victoria Beach Condominiums off Cosey Beach Avenue found Long Island Sound lapping just a few feet from the foundations of some of its 11 buildings, the condo association got together, got its elected representatives involved, went to the state and together they took care of the problem.A sand berm constructed to protect three buildings in 1986 after the state had denied permission to build a seawall had washed away and was replaced four times before being largely destroyed by Irene. Then sandbags that had been installed as a temporary solution following Irene washed away during Sandy.Neighbors asked the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection after Irene for permission to build a sloped stone revetment behind a new sand berm that would then be stabilized by sea grass.DEEP, which frowns on "armored" solutions that often just push problems down the beach and instead favors more natural, planted "living shoreline" concepts, denied it.But after Sandy, Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr., state Sen. Leonard Fasano, R-North Haven, and state Rep. James Albis, D-East Haven, helped convince DEEP that it was necessary to protect the complex, with Fasano making his case in a face-to-face meeting with DEEP Commission Daniel Esty, the senator said.It's one of the few protection measures put into place so far in Connecticut that goes beyond individual homes.The $350,000 cost, including engineering, was borne entirely by Victoria Beach residents."We didn't get any financial help at all," said Victoria Beach condo association President Patric Marchitto. "But that was a big thing -- getting DEEP to approve an armored stone, sloped revetment."He pointed out that "it's based on this 'living shoreline' idea that DEEP likes." But "if it wasn't for the mayor and Senator Fasano we probably wouldn't have gotten it done," Marchitto said. "We'd probably still be fighting with DEEP."But the work was necessary and has helped, he said."I mean," after Sandy, "people would step out their back doors and out their little balconies and they could drop 6 feet into a hole," he said.Brian Thompson, director of the DEEP's Office of Long Island Sound Programs, said that in conversation, "It was very clear that they felt strongly that they needed a harder solution there."DEEP doesn't always approve those kinds of solutions. But in this case it did.Meanwhile, "the larger efforts to look at larger areas of coast and how to protect them, we're really just getting started on them," he said.Identifying areas vulnerable to floodsAccording to Thompson, one of the things to come out of the federal Sandy Recovery Improvement Act of 2013 "that could be of the greatest benefit in terms of looking at larger, sort of community projects" is a comprehensive coastal study that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is getting ready to do.Its purpose is "to identify the vulnerable areas ... and begin to identify options for mitigating" the effects of future storms, he said.But at this point, the Army Corps has only had very preliminary discussions with DEEP, he said.While the Army Corps already is working on potential mitigation measures to protect some other areas, including decimated parts of the New Jersey shore, "our shoreline is much more varied, with rocky headlands and lots of bays and inlets," Thompson said."We tend not to have long, wide beaches," he said. "I think the solutions are going to be smaller in scale and more varied, sort of to match the variations of the coast."On a state level, "We've been very focused on this idea of a resiliency center based at UConn," Thompson said. "The legislature in this last legislative session worked on having DEEP and UConn work together on this."The center would be based at the University of Connecticut campus at Avery Point in Groton and would exist "to provide technical assistance to towns," he said. "It's an idea that we're very interested in."But researchers from the Werth Center for Coastal and Marine Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, aided by students, already are on the ground in East Haven and West Haven, plotting the extent of floodwaters the entire length of the coasts in both communities during both Irene and Sandy and eventually building computer maps.They plan to do the same in other communities, including Fairfield and Old Lyme, with the goal to create data models that can plug in other variables -- including sea level rise -- to determine, if a certain type of storm were to hit in a certain year, just how bad the damage might be.Southern's work is led by oceanographer James Tait, an associate professor of science education and environmental studies, and assistant professor of geography Ezgi Akpinar Ferrand.It was spurred in part by the fact that Tait lives on Silver Sands Road, just upland from Cosey Beach Avenue in East Haven, which was one of the hardest-hit areas in the country during Irene.While he was high and dry during both storms, "I sort of got to watch" and "I儲存felt bad watching it all happen," said Tait.Unlike Irene, "Sandy came in the middle of the night, so nobody knew exactly where it was," he said. "One thing we decided we could do was map the flood lines" and so far "we have started to figure out sort of where Sandy was."The interactive maps the project will create "can predict ... what sea level would be and where high and low tides would be in future storms," said Akpinar Ferrand. "We can create early warnings and send out maps" to show which areas are likely to be threatened, she said.The work complements other work that previously had been done, including a Coastal Resilience Tool that the Nature Conservancy has online as a way to help Connecticut and New York communities plan for future storms.Tait said it also can help determine factors that reduce vulnerability, from the beach width and slope to elevation of nearby land.During Sandy, the width of the beach area was a primary factor in determining how much damage a coastal community suffered, Tait said. In areas with a wide beach, the damage was minimal, but in narrow beach areas, the effects were much more profound.In fact, the waters of Long Island Sound extended 1,845 feet inland in the Silver Sands Road and Farview Road area of East Haven,Tait said."One of the things we're doing is, we're starting beach-stability studies," grappling with such questions as how much sand might be necessary to restore a wide enough beach to properly protect adjacent neighborhoods, he said."The problem here is that the Connecticut coast is just a naturally eroding coast," which, because of how narrow Long Island Sound is -- and with Long Island in the way -- doesn't naturally replenish in the summer sand that gets swept out from the shore in the winter, Tait said."The thing that I think needs to happen is, if you're going to live on an eroding beachfront, you've got to put the sand back," he said.While the DEEP doesn't currently allow coastal communities to recover sand that gets swept out, even when it's just offshore, "they're doing it in other states," including Florida, he said.Army Corp helps with dredgingWhile the Army Corps has yet to began the comprehensive coastal study, area communities are involved with the corps on other issues.In Milford, "we're in discussion with the Army Corps of Engineers, trying to get some dredging done in the Housatonic ... and to be able to get some sand to replace the sand that we lost," said Richards.Milford also is working with DEEP on a project, begun after Irene, to clean out Calf Pen Meadow Creek to prevent future flooding, he said.The state last week opened intake centers for the Hurricane Sandy Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery and Rehabilitation/Rebuilding Program in Milford and East Haven, as well as Fairfield and Norwalk.In New Haven, "one of the big things that we're doing right now is securing Long Wharf Pier from the beating that it took in both Irene and Sandy," said Deputy Director of Emergency Management Rick Fontana.The work, to be reimbursed by FEMA, involves reinstalling rock "rip rap" in the area surrounding the pier to protect it, he said.Other damage that still must be addressed is at the Sound School off Water Street, but in New Haven, "Believe it or not, we didn't have many people who were displaced from residential areas."The city also hopes to get some mitigation funds to beef up the seawall off Townsend Avenue in Morris Cove, he said.Center District Deputy Fire Chief Scott Schwartz, who is West Haven emergency response coordinator, said the Army Corps already was working on "re-engineering the shoreline" before Sandy, and that work continues.But "other than just rebuilding, we haven't been able to get to look at the facts of the sand loss or anything like that," he said."I think in West Haven we got pretty lucky," Schwartz said. "I don't know if it was because Lighthouse Point juts out and sort of protects us, or what."West Haven lost one house on Ocean Avenue, about six houses up from the Milford line, and "they're going to rebuild it," he said.There was "a pretty big surge" at Third Avenue Extension and Blohm Street during Sandy, but "at this point, everybody's back in, except for that one house," Schwartz said.The beaches are another story.Schwartz estimated that the tides "probably took out 15 years of sand in that one storm ... Mother Nature, she's a beast sometimes."The federal Department of the Interior on Thursday announced $162 million for 45 construction and research projects to protect Atlantic Coast communities from future storms, including several involving the removal of old dams in Connecticut.Among them are an "aquatic connectivity and flood resilience" project to remove the Pond Lily Dam on the West River in New Haven, upstream of Westville Village, and similar projects to remove old dams on the Norwalk River in Norwalk, Jeremy River in Colchester, Whitford Brook in Mystic and the Pawcatuck River in Connecticut and Rhode Island.Curt Johnson, executive director of Save the Sound, said that in the wake of Sandy and Irene, "one of the things we're concerned about is old, rotten mill dams" such as Pond Lily, which raises the level of the water 6 feet.Any future failure of the dam presents "possible danger to Westville Village and also leads to flooding upstream in Woodbridge. Removal of the dam will not only prevent catastrophic flooding downstream but also" will take care of flooding upstream, Johnson said.It also removes a centuries-old obstacle for spawning fish fighting to get upriver, he said.The Department of the Interior, through the Fish and Wildlife Service, also released funds for a number of flood-resilience studies that include Connecticut."What we witnessed during Hurricane Sandy was that our public lands and other natural areas are often the best defense against Mother Nature," Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a press release.East Haven Fire Chief Doug Jackson, who also is the town's emergency management director, said that of the numerous houses in East Haven that have been elevated since Irene, only three were paid for by FEMA -- and those had applications before that storm."A fourth got removed from the program after his house was wrecked in Irene," he said.While East Haven -- which lost 25 houses in Irene -- had less damage in Sandy, part of the reason was that "all the weakest calves in the herd got taken care of by Irene," Jackson said.During Sandy, "It was mostly high water," and the flooding was higher than during Irene, he said.Since the two storms, which exposed vulnerabilities, "the town has been working to get some assistance to raise Coe Avenue at Short Beach Avenue," which was impassible, Jackson said. "If that road was a little higher, then we wouldn't lose it two hours before the peak of the storm."Albis, who was chairman of the Shoreline Preservation Task Force that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy formed after Irene, said the four bills that the task force spawned have helped in the wake of Sandy, including one that aimed to bridge "a disconnect between homeowners or property owners who wanted to protect their homes and DEEP."The law changes "were geared toward trying to make that process easier to understand for the property owners," he said.As was the case with the Victoria Beach condos, "People tend to favor hard structures" and DEEP "tends to disagree with that" and tries to promote "living shorelines" whenever possible, he said."The dunes can be very effective," he said, but "any long-term solution needs to take into account sea level rise. ... I think as we move into the future that people need to be sure and remember" the effects of Irene and Sandy.Fasano said that other things that had been under consideration in East Haven, such as the prospect of creating a taxation district in the Cosey Beach Avenue area to pay for future protection or improvements, were not embraced by neighbors.But in the Silver Sands area, where Fasano and his family own the Silver Sands Beach Club, a flood and erosion-control district already exists and "we're looking at restoring the shoreline to what it was in 1957," he said."There have been no applications yet," he said. "The big question is, where to you get the sand?" To barge or truck it in, "the expense is astronomical. The question is, can you do what you did in the '50s and pump it in? We believe that (the lost sand) is right off the beach."Call Mark Zaretsky at 203-789-5722. Have questions, feedback or ideas about our news coverage? 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