When Superstorm Sandy dumped 9 feet of water in Laurie Robinson’s house in Milford three years ago, the repairs were barely finished from the 6 feet of water Tropical Storm Irene had dumped 14 months earlier.
“Brand new kitchen,” she said on a recent early fall day that felt and looked more like July. “I was finished for two months.”
Now her kitchen sits 151/2 feet and 19 stairs above ground level. The house at the end of Cooper Avenue offers a better view than the old ground-level one did of Long Island Sound one long block away, the neighboring Silver Sands State Park and the surrounding salt marsh.
It also offers Robinson a sense of security. Which is why even after the two major storms and their accompanying damage, not to mention a previous flood from a nor’easter in December 1992, Robinson never considered leaving.
“No,” she said immediately and emphatically to the question. “I like it here.”
She has a lot of company.
Throughout Connecticut, thousands of homes have suffered what Robinson and most of her Cooper Avenue neighbors have suffered: repetitive loss, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency calls it, from flooding.
Many, like Robinson, have rebuilt multiple times. Many have elevated their homes because they want to or have to. Robinson went a step further, tearing down her old house and building a new one. And many, also like Robinson, have used government funds from an alphabet soup of federal programs and agencies to do some, if not all, of the work.
But shoreline and climate experts, public officials and others have grown increasingly critical of such programs, including the National Flood Insurance and Hazard Mitigation grant programs, arguing that they encourage rebuilding in places that have already shown themselves to be flood-prone and are likely to become more so due to climate change and its associated sea level rise.
And so those same people are starting to question the use of public funds to rebuild repetitive loss properties over and over. The worry is that despite all the money poured in, any number of these coastal areas may become uninhabitable in the not-too-distant future anyway, leaving homes like Robinson’s and her neighbors’ literally high and dry, but under the water permanently.
“Then I’d make my garage a boat ramp,” she said, not entirely joking. “I’m 62 years old. I don’t foresee that happening in my lifetime. That would be my daughter and I don’t see it happening in her lifetime either. I could hope anyway.”
The gnarly question is whether the time has come to more regularly consider a more drastic response: not rebuilding. Some wonder if the better use for public dollars would be for buyouts, thereby abandoning shoreline development to nature.
Rebuilding was always the pledge, said Joe MacDougald. He runs the Center for Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and works with CIRCA, the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation. He’s also held multiple municipal government positions in Madison, including finance and planning and zoning. “With every storm — ‘We will rebuild.’ Well the answer is ‘… you’ll rebuild. Which parts?'”
“How are you the zoning commission that turns to the next rebuild after you’ve approved four on the street and says ‘no?’ That’s everything.”
But buyouts in Connecticut have been glaringly unpopular — chosen by an infinitesimal fraction of property owners who have suffered repetitive losses.
It’s no surprise to Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, who has looked at these sorts of situations around the world.
“We incentivize rebuilding at the community and state level,” he said. “If you look at what happened following Hurricane Sandy, pretty much everything went back right where it was.”
The reason, he said — there was no risk in doing that.
“If you’re the mayor of Sea Bright [N.J.] — you don’t really need to care about the science of coastal hazards or the inevitability of sea level rise because what you just saw from the federal government is ‘Hey, we’ve got your backs. We’ll help you rebuild.'”
Through five storms — a March 2010 flood, a January 2011 winter storm, Irene, the October 2011 snowstorm and Sandy — there have been 43 FEMA buyouts approved in Connecticut. Fewer than 20 percent have been on the shoreline. The rest have been on inland waterways.
By contrast, in Vermont, where the remnants of Irene caused massive flooding, there have been 126 FEMA buyouts.
Statewide buyouts are a drop in the bucket — pun intended — compared to the number of properties damaged repeatedly in recent years. Some lay the blame for that discrepancy squarely on shoreline municipal leaders who are thought to be loathe to give up the hefty property taxes on waterfront and water-view properties — often also the riskiest locations.
“You can look at that two ways if you’re going from the town’s perspective. They’re saying a huge amount of their tax rolls and their grand list is based on taxing these shoreline properties,” said Diane Ifkovic, the state’s national flood insurance coordinator, located within the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. She said DEEP has tried to discuss property buyouts with municipalities largely to no avail. (Municipalities have to apply for them on behalf of property owners.)
“Then you go to the other side of the coin — Is this wise? There may be a point where these people are in the water and there’s no land anymore to tax.”
Flood insurance payouts on the repetitive loss properties totaled just over $241 million for the buildings alone. (There was another near $38 million in payments for contents, but many owners do not insure contents.)
These figures, however, likely dramatically underreport repetitive flooding. The statistics are based on claims by property owners who carry flood insurance and it’s widely thought that many shoreline and inland waterway properties in Connecticut do not. So even if they have had multiple incidents, they would not be included in the statistics.
Milford is the dubious repetitive loss winner with 1,626 claims on 551 properties.
Milford Mayor Ben Blake said some 2,000 properties were damaged in Sandy and that some 4,000 properties are in flood zones. “There were houses that washed out to sea, houses that shifted off foundations,” he told a recent forum for municipal leaders on climate change and sustainability. “There were houses that had their faces ripped off so they looked like dollhouses.”
But asked whether some of those homes should be abandoned, he avoided a direct response.
“A lot of these homes, generations of their families have lived in them. They have attachments,” he said. “There’s a saying – ‘If you’re lucky enough to live near the beach, you’re lucky enough.’ But people have an attachment to their property for good or for bad and they’ll cling vigorously to their homes.”
And so far in Milford, all but six have — and even those acquisitions aren’t complete.
Jan Ellen Spiegel is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (www.ctmirror.org). Copyright 2015 (c) The Connecticut Mirror.
