Flood hits home, stranding woman in Marshfield
Rides out storm surge as neighbors evacuate
Lynda Connolly has dealt with plenty of coastal flooding in her 32 years in Marshfield, but the torrent of water that swamped her home at the height of this week’s snowstorm was worse than anything she’s had to deal with in the past.
“I’ve never seen the water come in so fast and so furious,” she told the Herald. “It just came in and there was nothing you could do.”
Connolly, 68, said she and her beloved Shih Tzu-Yorkie mix, Jamie, were stranded in her bedroom for hours Thursday as more than a foot of black, cold, muddy water poured into her Ocean Street home, leaving it completely uninhabitable.
“All I could do was sit on my bed with my dog and wait for it to go down, which took about seven hours,” Connolly recalled. “We’ve had floods before. In ’91, that was the worst flood we had up until this one.”
Although National Guard members fanned out through her neighborhood to rescue people from their waterlogged homes, Connolly said she opted to stay in bed.
“At that point I was cold and tired and I was in my bed,” she said. “I just didn’t want to go to a shelter.”
Now Connolly said she is beginning the arduous process of filing an insurance claim and arranging for an adjuster to visit her house. The thought of being left in limbo while waiting for a payout, she said, has her thinking of picking up and moving away from the coast.
“I’m 68 years old, I think it’s time for me to move on,” she said. “I don’t think I could go through this again . ... It’s all destroyed . ... We love it here so much but something like this ... this time, it really knocked the crap out of me.”