Gwyneth K. Shaw Photo
Gigi Mauro-Celentano intercepted Blumenthal and Malloy while walking her dog, Rita.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal walked a windswept stretch of Morris Cove beach Friday afternoon looking to comfort homeowners struggling to recover from Superstorm Sandy.
They got an earful from a handful of locals with a long-running request: Save our homes by building us a seawall.
“This house is going to go down,” grumbled resident Tony Sacco (pictured above) outside his home at 66 Townsend Ave., noting that his wife, Lucille, is growing afraid to sleep inside. “The next one, we’ll go.”
In front of Sacco’s home, inches from the lapping tide, sat concrete Jersey barriers, which the city installed before Tropical Storm Irene hit last year. Just behind those barriers were the remains of a homemade seawall Sacco and some of his neighbors were building — until, they said, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) stopped them.
“DEEP is more concerned about shellfish than they are about the people here,” said Beth Bernardo, who lives nearby on Morris Cove Road. She’s been in the neighborhood all her life, just like her parents and grandparents.
Bernardo brought reinforcements to her discussion with Malloy and other elected officials: Century-old postcards (pictured) of the same stretch of beach, showing plenty of sand in front of the homes.
The residents’ pleas echoed those made a year ago, after Irene’s wrath swept through the area. New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said the city applied for a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant through the state after the storm, asking for about $1.4 million for what’s estimated to be a $2 million project. The seawall would stretch in front of about 10 homes, he said; the project would require some contribution from homeowners, too.
DeStefano said he hoped the aftermath of Sandy would help speed the approval of the grant.
“I think if these homeowners deserve anything, it’s an answer,” he said.
“The federal government has in the past provided flood protection for this neighborhood,” DeStefano said. “This is not a case where I think these houses have to be removed. This is solved by a seawall.”
Malloy and Blumenthal pledged to help any way they can. The governor said he would look into why DEEP stopped work on the residents’ own efforts, saying he suspected it might have been a simple permitting issue.
“I personally support efforts to properly build seawalls and to protect established communities,” Malloy said.
Malloy said he is seeking “every dollar we can reasonably bring back” from FEMA and other federal agencies in the wake of the storm.
Gigi Mauro-Celentano welcomed the federal, state and city officials. Walking her dog, Rita, she chatted with Malloy and Blumenthal as they strode past her home, just down the beach from Sacco’s. The water came within 4 feet of her deck Monday night, she said, but didn’t reach her basement.
Despite having no electricity, she said she just felt lucky, especially in light of the devastation in Staten Island, N.Y., and New Jersey’s shore towns.
Mauro-Celentano also said she has no plans to leave.
“We love it in the summer. It’s beautiful,” she said. “You have to take the bad with the good.”
Way back,before the 1938 hurricane and many times since, this asinine building on unbuildable land should have been outlawed and the rest of us should have stopped subsidies for flood insurance via our federal taxes.
We should stop these ridiculous subsidies for these folk and their continuous cycles of build, insure, flood, hurricane,destruction, and sometimes death, and then rebuild again on the same site
At least make these folk pay the full cost of their follies and stop the subsidies by the rest of us,