After this Stamford neighborhood flooded, residents took action
STAMFORD — The legs on Evelyn Avoglia’s chair are made of metal. The floor in her home is tile. She’s replaced plasterboard walls with concrete. “Everything I own is up on something that’s waterproof,” she said this week.
Avoglia lives in Stamford, across Washington Boulevard from the Rippowam River. Her home has flooded twice in the 24 years she’s lived there. In 2007 she returned home, opened the door and “a Navajo rug was floating over the bamboo floor, which was already warping.”
After that, Avoglia switched from the “lovely” bamboo flooring to waterproof tile. She did what she could to make sure her home survived any future flooding.
Then, when Hurricane Ida hit in 2021, she was “smart enough to be panicked.” The manhole cover outside her condo “looked like Old Faithful,” she said.
“The super tried to come and find me and see if he could help me at about 3 in the morning, but there was 18 inches or so of water outside the building,” she said. “Inside, I had about 4 inches, which of course is 1 inch higher than the 3-inch baseboard. That’s all it took. We were back to square one. The only thing I didn’t have to replace was the tile floor.”
Though she knows she can’t stop the flooding itself, Sue Sweeney has done what she can to make sure neighborhood residents know when to panic and when it’s safe to stay in their homes.
For two years now, Sweeney and a small group of neighborhood residents have tracked rainfall and compared it against river height, in an attempt to devise a sort of early warning system for local residents.
“The people I knew from this area who’d been flooded were terrified every time it
rained. They thought Ida was coming back,” she said. “So, I started a little email group to prove to them that wasn’t happening and say, ‘Look, we got 2 feet of water in the river right now. We’re anticipating getting 2 inches of rain. This is not Ida. You’re OK. You can go to sleep tonight.’”
Every rainstorm, Sweeney says she uses U.S. Geological Survey data to compare the height of the river to the amount of rainfall, as tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And it works. “At some point in the second year I saw that 2 inches of rain equals a foot-and-ahalf of water in the river,” she said.
Sweeney knows a thing or two about flooding. A master gardener since 2004, she was for a time the official city photographer documenting the work of the Army Corps of Engineers to reconfigure Mill River Park for flood mitigation. That endeavor began in 2009, after the 2007 flood during which Avoglia said people were kayaking down Summer Street.
“That was a two-year project, and I learned a phenomenal amount about hydrology from them,” she said.
At some point, Sweeney realized that the flood alerts she would get when it rained were useless in her neighborhood. “In this city, we have two kinds of flood warnings: the coastal ones that you pay attention to, and the interior ones which say don’t drive under the railroad bridge.”
In 2021, for example, Hurricane Ida caused the Rippowam River to flood so much that residents of homes several blocks away saw cars destroyed, basements under water and power knocked out.
Susan Cavanaugh was flooded out during Ida, even though she lives nearly three blocks away from the river. She’s not sure why the water got so high.
“I’ve heard just so many different stories and I don’t know what the real truth is why this happened,” she said. “It just was fast and furious, and I don’t I don’t want to ever go through it again.”
Cavanaugh said she “looked outside and it was like I was in a moat.”
“I was completely surrounded by water,” she said. “There was not a piece of dry earth around me.”
Julie Brown, who also lives near Scalzi Park, described the 2007 deluge as her family’s first severe flood.
“The river overflowed into our condominium parking lot, down the elevator shafts and filled the underground parking garage,” she said. “Firefighters ordered residents to evacuate. Many residents lost their cars, both in the underground garage and ground level parking areas, and the building suffered a great deal of damage. Neighbors with ground floor condos lost everything on their first floors.”
Sweeney was skeptical at first that her predictive metric was accurate. There are, she knew, many factors that might cause the height of the river to fluctuate. But, after continuing the project she was able to confirm that her estimate — 2 inches of rain for every 1.5 feet of river height — is usually accurate within 80 or 90 percent.
“I think it has to do with the exact configuration of the neighborhood: How our storm drains are configured, where we get our watershed from, all of those things put together,” she said.
The river floods at a minimum of 5.5 feet, Sweeney said. It rose to nearly 8 feet during Ida. Sweeney suggests residents should start getting concerned when the river hits 3.5 feet.
Sweeney knows that none of her work will mitigate the flooding itself. That is the city’s job, she said, and, “We’re just simply not tied into the Stamford political structure.” But knowing more accurately when to expect a flood can help residents prepare, she said.
“All that’s going to do for people is give them the tools if they choose to use them, to determine whether they’re about to get flooded or not, so they know to move their cars to higher ground, they know to put out sandbags,” she said. “But it’s not going to stop the flooding.”
Avoglia said that “in an ideal world,” the city would be able to predict flooding on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, but “there is a granular level that seems to escape the ability of the staff of the municipality to deal with.”
“We’ve been caught with our pants down here,” Avoglia said. “At this point, at least, we have a belt, because Sue has spearheaded that kind of stuff that, when I heard we were going to have three inches of rain, I knew that that could be a flood event. I stayed awake. I was ready.”