New Haven Independent

Since the flooding began two weeks ago, some homeowners are asking if the fault lies with road-widening work being done on nearby Whalley Avenue by the state Department of Transportation (DOT) . The incidents renewed fears that the work would exacerbate problems that threatened the stability of their tidy homes.

The DOT’s response: It’s not us.

An agency spokesman suggested that the current flooding could be due to the fact that the neighborhood was built in the 1930s on what used to be an ice pond, and has therefore had flooding problems over the years.

The area’s state representative, Pat Dillon, isn’t so sure. She suggested the problem may not be too much water, but too little.

Meanwhile, the DOT says it will replace a 7-foot-high culvert under Whalley Avenue at Westerleigh Road starting Jan. 12, shutting down one lane in each direction of the busy artery until April 1.

Rerun?

In the past two weeks, water has resurfaced as a problem for at least two households on Westerleigh, a road that runs between Whalley and Lawncrest Road in the Beverly Hills section of Westville, between Fountain Street and Whalley Avenue. Residents hope it’s not a repetition of the severe problems that began in 2004 and threatened the stability of their homes.

In an email to Richard Zbrozek, the DOT’s project manager for the $9.3 million Whalley widening project, neighbor Rachel Vaters-Carr complained of “severe flooding issues with a uniquely high water table. Two of my neighbors on Westerleigh Rd. have had significant basement flooding, which both verify have never experienced within the last decade of residence ownership.

“Indeed I have been experiencing flooding in my garage, where the concrete slab is literally floating on a high water table (you can see the water squish through cracks when you stand on it, and can see the water sitting in the vertical pores of the cinder block slab). Additionally, the sump pump in my basement has run continuously in recent weeks (even prior to this latest snowmelt and rainfall),” she reported.

In an interview Tuesday, Vaters-Carr’s husband, Richard Carr, confirmed that his sump pump, which had been installed in the past year, has been running all the time. He said his and his neighbor’s driveways were icy and water had caused his garage floor to float. He showed a reporter a number of drains in his basement floor, especially near the hatch leading outside.

“We realized, ‘Hey, something is going on in this neighborhood,’” he said. He said he suspects water is flowing underground due to streams that may have shifted recently.

“We went to the state. We went to the DOT meeting on widening Whalley Avenue. It did no good,” he said.

Carr’s next-door neighbor, Carlos Sanchez, said he experienced flooding over the past weekend, something that had not happened in his 10 years in the house.

“Sunday morning, I found a hole in the basement floor that had been covered up when I bought the house,” he said. “Maybe they had a [sump] pump,” he said of the previous owners.

“The rain Saturday night and melted snow brought the water up. I had three inches in my basement.”

A plumber friend helped him pump the water out and will supply a sump pump so the incident will not be repeated during this weekend’s expected rain and snow storm.

Carr identified another neighbor as possibly having flooding problems, but a woman who answered the door at that home said she had experienced none.

Visits to several homes and businesses on Westerleigh, Beverly Road and Whalley Avenue found nobody else who had experienced recent flooding.

But going back more than six years, neighbors have reported water seepage that caused foundations to destabilize, support beams to shift and walls to show cracks.

“The pumping station has been taken off line” as part of the widening, Carr noted, referring to the structure at Whalley and East Ramsdell Street, one block east.

A DOT spokesman said the pumping station was for sanitary sewers, a self-contained system that had nothing to do with the current problem.

“We are extremely confident that this work is having no impact to anyone in the vicinity,” said Kevin Nursick, the spokesman. “If anything, we are improving the drainage system on Whalley Avenue.” Nobody answered the door at the project headquarters farther east on Whalley Avenue Tuesday.

Nursick said the DOT will soon announce that the culvert carrying groundwater to the West River under Whalley Avenue will be replaced with a 7-foot by 3-foot culvert starting Jan. 12 at 9 a.m. The work will close a lane on Whalley between Westerleigh and Glenview Terrace, one block away, until April 1.

The current work, including sewer-pipe replacement that tied up Whalley in the area from Dec. 15 to 19, had “absolutely nothing to do with any water issues in this area,” Nursick claimed.

He cited a study commissioned by the city in 2005. It showed some of these neighborhoods were built on a filled in pond, he said.

That is “problematic in an of itself. Organic material [used for fill] is compressed and holds water. If there is a void in a basement, water has some place to go. This year has been more difficult than others,” he said.

Not so fast, said State Rep. Pat Dillon, D-92, who has been following this issue for years.

“In the past, the DOT has been very rigid about claiming no involvement in issues,” she said. “They have been so rigid that one can be skeptical of what they say.”

About the pond theory, Dillon said a 2006 study showed that some of the affected homes were not in the filled-in area.

“The city did have that hypothesis, but the houses did not fit the footprint,” Dillon said. “We paid for a $200,000 study by Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering about three years ago,” she said.

After the first phase of the $250,000 study, Dillon said, then-Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Gina McCarthy told her not to continue to study the problem because she was convinced it was due to a drop in the water table caused by state and federal flood-prevention efforts. McCarthy is now a high U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official.

Dillon said she brought up her conclusions at a meeting with DOT officials several years ago “and they bristled. I think that’s unprofessional,” she said.

She said she just received word of the latest round of problems and could not yet comment on them.

City Engineer Richard Miller said he doesn’t think the state’s work is causing problems in the neighborhood.

“The groundwater is very high in that area,” he said. “That’s a problem in areas of the city including this one.”

The flood-remediation work was done farther to the east and would not be a factor in this problem, he said. Although there are pipes that carry streams underground to the West River, Miller said it was quite unlikely that they are leaking and contributing to the homeowners’ woes.