Melissa Bailey Photo
Chuck Mascola takes a break from bailing out his basement to start tending to his yard.
Morris Cove started bailing out from Superstorm Sandy with the help of a hardy gardening statuette — and a market that kept brewing coffee even when the whole neighborhood’s lights went dark.
The coastal neighborhood awoke Tuesdayto find that nobody had power, many large trees had crashed down, and some basements had filled with water.
But there was still coffee at Krauszer’s. The neighborhood store had stayed open, and brewing.
As Sandy subsided Tuesday, many Morris Covers counted their blessings that the surge had not proved as bad as predicted. None of the houses suffered major structural damage, and most areas avoided serious flooding, according to Alderman Sal DeCola.
On Tuesday morning, neighbors ventured outside to pick up branches and drain pipes scattered by the storm. Others, like Chuck Mascola, returned home after leaving the neighborhood amid evacuation orders.
Mascola (pictured at the top of this story) didn’t plan on leaving home despite the Sandy evacuation order. He wanted to stay with his house on Cove Street, one of the city’s most vulnerable streets to flooding. The water attacks his house not from the waterfront, as one would expect — but from the street, inland. Water pushes up through a city storm drain, flooding Cove Street and rolling back downhill into Mascola’s yard.
The water did just that Monday, swamping his yard and rushing into his basement.
At 8:30 p.m. Monday, as the floodwaters rose, Mascola put on waders and grabbed his dog in his arms. He and his wife trudged through a foot and a half of water to their car, which he had parked on higher ground. They drove off for the night.
“You Know What? We’re Alive”
He returned Tuesday morning to survey the damage. He turned the key in the front door, fearing he’d find a foot of water in the living room.
He discovered the first floor was safe, but the basement (pictured) was filled to the brim with 7 feet of water. His pumps had been overwhelmed.
Firefighters from the Townsend Avenue station came over to help pump out the basement, as they did in Tropical Storm Irene last year.
Mascola took a break Tuesday at noon to send an email to family members promising free beer to those who help clean up. He announced a second, tongue-in-cheek enticement: “Big tag sale on Cove Street. Slightly wet.”
Mascola leaned down to pick up his statuette of Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardening (and taxicab drivers), who had fallen face-first into the ground.
Unscathed, Saint Fiacre looked on as Mascola joined his wife in raking leaves.
Mascola said the situation could have been a lot worse. “You know what? We’re alive. And the house is here.”
Farther up the beach along the Cove, Mark DeCola of the city engineering department peered out the back of a Townsend Avenue house at 10:40 a.m. He arrived on a mission to document the storm damage along the beachfront, and report back to City Hall by noon.
He discovered the only damage along Townsend fell close to home: His brother Sal, the alderman, lost his deck in the storm. Sandy sent the Sound surging 7 feet above normal height, according to Mayor John DeStefano.
All the other houses on Townsend appeared to have survived without structural damage, reported neighbor Tony Avallone (pictured with DeCola).
“A Beautiful Thing”
Around the corner, other neighbors brought their own storm stories to a central hub — Krauszer’s market at 25 Townsend Ave.
Michelle Coomes left her house, which like the rest of the neighborhood, still no power as of 11 a.m. She walked into Krauszer’s. The store had no lights, either. Through the darkness, she heard the distinctive sound of something bubbling …
Melissa Bailey Photo
“Coffee! This is a beautiful thing,” declared Coomes.
She said she was about to get out her camping stove and make instant coffee. Then she thought: “You know, that’s too much work. Let’s go to Krauszer’s.”
Coomes filled up her cups and left for her job at Kohl’s department store, where she would be stocking the jewelery department even though the store was closed.
As she stacked up three cups of coffee for the road, hairdresser Gina Rivera marveled at the luxury of fresh java in a blackout.
“How do you have coffee?” she asked the clerk. “You’ve gotta tell us your secret.”
Morris Cove streetlights remained dark as of midday Tuesday.
Mohammad Ishfaq, who has owned the store since 1997, recounted how he persevered for the past two days. He kept the store open through the storm, serving water, ice, and lots of coffee to firefighters, cops and neighbors until 11 p.m. Monday. Unable to drive home, he crashed at his clerk’s house nearby. He returned to the market Tuesday morning to find the lights out. Judging by the surveillance tape, he said, the power went out at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Without power, Ishfaq resorted to “old-style” tactics to keep the store going. He fired up the gas stove and boiled a saucepan of water. Then he poured it into his two coffeemakers to brew. Without electricity to power the cash register, his clerk punched prices into a handheld calculator.
Ishfaq ran a swift business Tuesday morning serving up his popular breakfast sandwiches of bacon, egg and cheese. And he kept busy fueling the coffeemakers with more hot water.
“Thank you,” said one customer, who was up all night tending to sewage problems for the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority. “I haven’t had coffee in two days.”
Elsewhere around the Cove, Walter Traynham and fellow city parks workers cleared a tree from Myron Street …
… and private contractors from Asplundh chopped down a tree that had been leaning on wires, dimming lights on Vinnie Amodio’s Dean Street home.
Christy Hass, deputy parks department director, supervised both scenes. She brought good tidings from Lighthouse Point Park: Parks staffers’ hard work, including the heroic rescue of an iconic organ at the center of the merry-go-round, had paid off. Barricades they erected help soften the blow of the waves against the 100-year-old carousel building. And opening the windows let the sea swarm in, then recede, without any major structural damage, she said. The storm filled the carousel building with 32 to 40 inches of water, which would have damaged the organ if the parks crew hadn’t gotten it out in time.
Some big trees still had to be cleared, Hass noted, including a mammoth oak on Concord.
Two trees fell onto a single home on Dean Street, where the wind picked up speed across the airport runway.
Though the whole neighborhood had no power, city crews still had to wait for clearance from United Illuminating to tend to the trees that were blocking roads, Hass said. That’s because some people have generators, which send electrical charge back into the wires. UI has to check the lines so city parks workers don’t get electrocuted.
Contrary to neighbors’ suspicions, United Illuminating did not flip a switch and kill power to the whole neighborhood, according to UI spokesman Michael West. Morris Cove lost power because of a combination of numerous downed lines.
By 2 p.m. Tuesday, some houses in the neighborhood regained power, according to Alderman Sal DeCola.
Though he lost his back deck overlooking the Long Island Sound, DeCola said that “overall, I think we did quite well in the big picture.” The neighborhood Halloween parade, set for Wednesday, will go on on Saturday night at 6 instead.
The flooding and damage weren’t as bad as they could have been, he said. As for his deck, he said he plans to “take it apart first and then redesign it in a way that it can take this kind of beating.”
DeCola saw a silver lining in the storm: While previous storms have gobbled up beachfront over the decades, Sandy actually added sand to Morris Cove, he noted.
“We picked up a foot and a half behind my house,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”
Good story. But the water may come up a lot higher next time.
CT should create a program similar to NJ's "Blue Acres." http://www.northjersey.com/news/129389153_Hillsdale_Mayor_and_Council_support_Blue_Acres_program.html