The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lawmakers reintroduce disaster debris relief act for homeowners
HAMDEN — Adele Volpe was standing in her living room when the tornado tore the roof off her home last year.
She never knew it was coming.
“I was completely shocked,” Volpe said. “I watched everything turn green and flying horizontally — the trees, the telephone poles.”
Volpe stayed in her home that night of May 15, 2018, but hasn’t been able to live there since, she said.
“I’d hate to even think about what I’m going to have to pay to clean this up,” she said. The repairs to her house have been extensive, but any debris that wasn’t touching or attached to her home, she’ll be responsible for paying to clean up.
The tornado damaged more than 200 houses in Hamden. Volpe’s home on October Hill Road is in the area where the town was hit the hardest.
In the wake of the storm, President Donald Trump declared Fairfield and New Haven counties a federal disaster area, which made the cities and towns struck by the tornado eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management
Agency.
While FEMA agreed to provide reimbursements for municipalities — a check Hamden is still waiting to receive — it denied assistance for individual homeowners such as Volpe.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and U. S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DConn., promised Monday to reintroduce legislation to help individuals get the financial help they need to cover the costs of debris cleanup that insurance companies don’t cover and people can’t afford.
“Want to ensure community members with the assistance they need and are owed,” DeLauro said, while standing in the driveway of resident Jill Pepe’s home, which was hit badly by the storm. While the town and community came together last year to help with debris cleanup, “there is federal responsibility here as well,” DeLauro said.
The DEBRIS Act, which the lawmakers first introduced last October, will open the way for individual owner-occupied homes to get federal assistance with debris cleanup on their properties even if FEMA hasn’t designated the area as meeting its disaster relief threshold.
The legislation would be retroactive to last May.
“We all believe it was an erroneous decision,” DeLauby ro said. “It’s both proof and a reminder that the relief process isn’t always working for our community members if it is blocking them from the support that they need and the support they deserve.”
The act would be submitted with the 2020 Department of Homeland Security bill, Blumenthal said.
“We are seeking the authority, not the specific money,” he said. “Right now there is a bar for getting any individual assistance. In this bill we’re looking to get that bar removed.”
Blumenthal said assistance could be provided to individuals without additional funding to the federal budget.
“The individual costs are huge for homeowners, but the total cost is a pittance compared to the federal budget,” he said.
DeLauro said the federal government can step in the way Hamden’s local government did when the town’s public works department picked up debris curbside if residents could get it there.
Mayor Curt B. Leng said an estimated 2,000 trees came down in streets and neighborhoods and 2,000 more were brought down in Sleeping Giant State Park. While many residents thought natural debris and fallen trees would be covered their homeowners insurance, they were met with the grave reality that it wasn’t unless it touched their home.
“You assume that in a disaster scenario they are covered,” Leng said. “They’re part of the damage, they’re part of what happened but there is that loophole.”
In Hamden, tree removal for some residents is up to $70,000, he said. Leng said, though, debris that has affected the home’s septic system is included under insurance and people should ask.
“Homeowners deserve some compensation,” Blumenthal said. “These folks on this street ought to be angry because the federal government has failed to cover essential disaster obligations here and elsewhere in Connecticut.”
Last year when the DEBRIS Act was introduced, Blumethal said it was met by opposition by a section of the Republican Party that controlled the House at the time.
“We faced intransigent opposition on the House side,” he said. “Now the politics have changed.”
Blumethal stressed that disaster relief should not be a political issue because all states and political parties are affected equally.