On Loughlin Road in Oxford, Conn., less than a half-mile uphill from state Highway 34 and the adjacent Housatonic River, Eightmile Brook is flowing at a languid 250 cu. ft. per second or so.
But that is just a trickle compared to the raging, life-threatening flood that it became on the afternoon of Aug. 18, 2024.
Casey Lucarelli was staying at her father's house on that rainy afternoon when in only 15 minutes, the usual tranquil stream became a debris-strewn rising river that practically surrounded the 1805 farmhouse and its even-older shed.
As Lucarelli was evacuating, Loughlin Road partially caved in behind her car from the force of the swollen creek that starts at Lake Quassapaug in Middlebury, slows at Papermill Pond in Southford Falls State Park south of Conn. 67, then tumbles sharply downhill before emptying into the Housatonic River.
Today, the piles of trees and boulders that cascaded onto the Lucarelli property are gone, but she and her father Gary are still picking up debris.
Downstream, the Conn. 34 bridge has been replaced with a temporary structure by the state Department of Transportation (CTDOT) while the agency makes plans for a larger, permanent span.
About 100 yds. upstream from the Lucarelli's property, another bridge on the two-lane town road remains washed out, dead-ending Loughlin Road.
The storm, which dropped as much as 12 in. of rain in parts of Southbury and Oxford, prompted Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont to seek a disaster declaration from then-President Joe Biden. Three people died that day, including two in Oxford, where the Little River jumped its banks. The third fatality, a Weston man, was found days later in Westport's Aspetuck River.
Little-known creeks like them and the Halfway River, which severely damaged the two now-vacant homes on tiny Old Station House Road in Newtown, are back to their scenic, harmless level.
Additionally, Boys Halfway River closed Conn. 34 just north of the Lake Zoar Drive-In. The stream spilled over its banks a few yards from the lake surrounding the diner that afternoon and swept away its small but heavily-traveled bridge.
Fivemile Brook, parallel to and just south of Eightmile Brook, was where a house fell into the floodwaters; in Southbury, Bullet Hill Brook wrecked part of the still-closed town library and one of its branches closed Kettletown Road more than a mile away.
Conn. 67 between Southbury and Oxford also was closed in several spots and most of the businesses in the Klarides Village near downtown Seymour were devastated by the Little River, which runs alongside the roadway.
Climate Change is Producing More Powerful Storms
The Lucarellis are among many families whose homes were among the estimated $300 million in damages from last summer's flooding.
State officials are planning for bigger, stronger bridges in addition to warning the public that as the Earth's climate changes and historic rainstorms and floods become more common, the public should acknowledge — and prepare for — the new risks.
Gary Lucarelli, at age 75, has owned the historic Old Stocking Mill house on Loughlin Road since 1999 and was away on a fishing trip during the storm.
The force of the flooding moved the heavy concrete lid of his septic tank about 40 yds. away; lugging it back took two workers. Fortunately, the flood ran around the house.
"I didn't get a drop in the cellar, but there was no driveway," Lucarelli said, while pointing to the next property downstream. "Down there, there was no road. They brought in tons of fill."
He has nothing but praise for the response of Oxford town officials led by seven-term First Selectman George Temple.
In a phone interview, Temple told CT Insider that Oxford municipal officials approved $4 million in long-term borrowing to pay for those town bridges and culverts not covered by the state. The final destroyed bridge in Oxford is located uphill from the Lucarellis' property and will likely cost more than $690,000 when the contract is awarded.
"I'm very grateful to the state and federal government and grateful for our public works and first responders," he said. "They did a bang-up job. You can fish in the Little River. It's clean as a whistle. When it rains, I get nervous. Before, I never got nervous [about it]. People down here care about each other and they don't care what your politics are."
Building Back Stronger
Annmarie Drugonis, the first selectwoman in the nearby town of Seymour, echoed Temple's feeling about the community coming together, especially when it came to the Klarides Village shopping plaza, where shop and restaurant owners found that many people, even folks they did not know, came down to muck out buildings after the flood subsided.
"If we don't help the small businesses, who's going to?" asked Drugonis, a former environmental cleanup specialist who donned a hazmat suit to help empty a destroyed freezer of spoiled food at the plaza's Route 67 Family Diner.
The volunteer assistance likely saved the business owner $10,000 in professional cleansing costs.
Upstream from Klarides Village, Drugonis would like to see dredging on Hoadley Pond, which overflowed that Sunday afternoon a year ago and destroyed the home of Andrew and Emily Brisch and their two children.
Now, with a second mortgage, the family is close to moving into a newly constructed house with a much-higher foundation, he told CT Insider. It required a second mortgage through the federal Small Business Administration (SBA), and aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) covered the price of the new foundation.
"We built the new foundation higher by about three or four feet than the old one," Andrew Brisch said. "We did higher ceilings to mitigate any damage if it were to ever happen again. It's [more] structurally sound than the old house. There was no foundation under it. It was just river rock, and it was level with the ground. There was eight feet of water in the house."
Millions of Dollars in Support Requested
The emergency declaration for major disaster relief came relatively quickly in September 2024, within weeks of Lamont's request.
Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal recalled pushing FEMA "really hard" last year and the effort yielded approximately $14.5 million to the state's homeowners, at least $10 million to cities and towns and $8 million for the SBA.
"We need to build resiliency before the next 100-year storm that comes in a few years in this new normal," Blumenthal said.
CTDOT Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto, who in the days after the flood visited dozens of hard-hit sites, including nearly washed-away sections of the Waterbury train line, said that there are plans to make the eventual permanent bridges more capable of withstanding larger floods. He expects the $35 million that the state has already spent on recovery will likely rise to about $55 million.
The agency's engineering plans for installing permanent bridges — the one over Eightmile Brook near the Housatonic River is only temporary — will include culverts with larger diameters.
"In terms of stream flow and clearance, you have to go through a lengthy permitting process," Eucalitto said. "That is currently under way. We'll never be able to do it for a 1,000-year storm, but at least what we can do is build to a current design standard."
He added that upgrading infrastructure is a national issue.
"Every state DOT is worried about this and they're seeing more frequency and more-serious storms like we saw in North Carolina, South Carolina and Kentucky last year," he said. "They're still recovering from those storms as well."
'Water Finds a Way'
Brenda Bergeron, deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, also heads up the agency's Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. During an interview with CT Insider at her Middletown office recently, she noted that her team is still processing municipal data on the costs of the storm response.
She said that the more than $14 million available for homeowners from FEMA included repairs, rental assistance, replacing household appliances such as heaters, washers and dryers and money for temporary housing. Once the White House declared the emergency, her office began assisting towns and cities in developing their projects.
"Twice now in the last few years we have seen regular rainstorms stall and cause catastrophic flooding in a focused area," Bergeron said. "When you get a notice now that there is a rainstorm in your area, you have to be conscious that it could be catastrophic."
"Water finds a way," Eucalitto told CT Insider. "It's an amazingly powerful feature of the earth. It just finds a way to do what it wants to do and go where it wants to go."
