Roads, Businesses Damaged by CT Floods. What’s Next?

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(TNS) – As the clouds cleared Monday morning, Connecticut looked out on a level of devastation officials said happens once every millennium. Meteorologists said more rain was on the way.

“As of right now, we do have 27 state roads that are closed, some due to damage, some due just to flooding,” said Samaia Hernandez, spokesperson for the state Department of Transportation. “We do have some bridges that are gone, and there’ll be a lot of areas to assess.”

The damage follows a storm that pounded portions of Connecticut Sunday, including Oxford, Monroe, Newtown and Seymour with up to a foot of rain over a short period.

The storm wiped out some roads, prompted rescues and two people were swept away and killed. Left behind were fallen trees, broken roads and plenty of other damage.

Hernandez said the damage was “estimated to be equivalent to a 1,000-year storm.”

The next 30 days

The days and weeks immediately after the storm will be what Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security Commissioner William Turner called the “initial damage assessment phase,” the goal of which he said is to “compile the extent of what occurred.”

When it comes to damaged public infrastructure, the goal is to find out “what was the dollar amount associated with it. Then, in terms of individual and business damages, we’re trying to understand the uninsured losses,” Turner said.

It’s not just an academic inquiry. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has thresholds that must be met for a presidential disaster declaration to make federal recovery money available. On a county level, those thresholds are based on population. Statewide, the damage must exceed $7 million.

Turner said “there’s no guarantee” of a presidential disaster declaration but, if not, “there’s state plans in place where we would work to address unmet needs throughout the long-term recovery phase.”

That $7 million threshold may seem easily met, considering the extent of the damage — bridges and dams washed out, roads closed for flooding, a sinkhole in Monroe. But there are caveats. Roads that are funded through the Federal Highway Administration, for example, don’t count toward the total, “and a lot of the DOT roads are FHWA funded,” Turner said. “So, we’re going to go for it and try to see if we get there. But again, it’s not a guarantee.”

For uninsured damages to property owned by individuals and businesses, Turner said, “it’s a little trickier.”

“It’s not a dollar amount, it’s more telling the story of the impact, where homes were destroyed, were people evacuated,” he said. “Some of that stuff we know is out there, but we have to go out there and actually get that information. That’s what we’re going to focus on this week, is reaching out to the towns and the homeowners and businesses to try to understand how much damage they experienced.”

At a press conference Monday afternoon, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D- Conn., said he’d been touring the damage and taking photos himself, hoping to help make the case to FEMA.

He said the damage is not “just what you see.” Underground power lines have been severed. Propane lines have been left unsecured by the storm.

The ramifications of the storm, he said, “are literally underground, everywhere, all the time, and that’s why the federal declaration has to be pursued as soon as possible.”

“I would say it is probably a matter of weeks, I hope not months,” Blumenthal said. “We’re going to push very hard.”

The state, Turner said, has “30 days from the incident to make the request. There is an option to extend that, but our goal has always been, ‘Let’s get the information as quickly as possible,'” though accuracy is possibly more important.

There might be the impulse to use this as an opportunity to improve on what was destroyed. “Down the road, there could be funding to do so, but the initial process is just what would it cost to fix it right now, as it was,” Turner said. FEMA’s mandate is to restore damage to pre-storm conditions.

“We also understand that to get accurate numbers, we need to get engineers involved, and sometimes it can take a little longer to get estimates for some of these projects,” Turner said. “So we’ll probably give the towns a couple weeks. We haven’t set a deadline yet, but give them a couple weeks to get their damages, and then we’ll compile it and see where we are, and make the determination.”

The economic impact

Beyond repairs to property, local businesses impacted by the flooding may not be able to pay staff. In some cases, the entire business may have been wiped away by mud and rain.

That’s what happened to Cathy Dibner, who runs a small chicken farm in Southbury called Cathy’s House of Chickens.

“My barn is gone. My chickens are dead,” she said. “We had over 10 feet of water back here. It was like an ocean.”

Raising chickens started as a hobby, Dibner said, but it became her livelihood. Now all 100 of her birds are gone.

“I don’t know where to go from here, to be honest,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Dibner is not the only one. Turner said businesses that had more than 40 percent uninsured losses may be able to access funding through the Small Business Administration’s disaster declaration, but “it’s a separate process.”

“We could, through the governor’s office, request a Small Business Administration declaration to potentially bring in what that does,” he said. “It really just opens up low interest loans to help those businesses recover or continue to operate and meet payroll.”

While Turner’s office can use that strategy, he said they’re focused first on FEMA.

“We go after the FEMA programs first, but we always know the SBA is right there as well for those businesses and nonprofits that might need help recovering in the event we don’t get the FEMA declaration,” he said.

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