The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Why won’t it stop raining on some Conn. neighborhoods?
I’m sorry, he’d said, after water and sewage destroyed her stuff. Other Hartford families talk about heirlooms and goods lost to a disgusting soup that carries with it dire health risks.
For years, residents and business owners in Hartford’s North End have watched the skies with an eye on their basements. For longer than anyone wants to remember, rain has been sending water and raw sewage spewing into the basements of homes and places of business.
How long has this been going on? Thirty-five years ago, Bridgitte Prince, formerly of Hartford’s Bellevue Square, lost her uniform, commendations and mementos from her five years in the U.S. Army. She’d left the items stored in a duffle bag in the basement of the Hartford home of her father, Elder “Bill” Prince Jr.
I’m sorry, he’d said, after water and sewage destroyed her stuff. Other Hartford families talk about heirlooms and goods lost to a disgusting soup that carries with it dire health risks. After particularly bad rains — as the region saw late last summer — one resident said she moved into a hotel after 73,000 gallons of sewage flooded her home.
There are a lot of “I’m sorries” going around, from politicians to local entities, to government officials to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, but it’s not lost on residents that the next rain is just around the corner.
After a recent neighborhood meeting, the Metropolitan District, the nonprofit municipal corporation responsible for providing potable water and sewer services to the Hartford region, released a statement that said, in part, that recent issues were exacerbated by unusually heavy rainfall, and that the next phase of $1.6 billion approved over the last 15 years for wastewater infrastructure should address some of the overflow. More information will be forthcoming this spring for people who are affected, according to the statement. Representatives from the EPA backed out of the meeting, according to the MDC statement, because members of the media were there. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal attended the meeting and said addressing the issue was “long overdue.”
The families affected are woven into the fabric of Hartford history. The Prince family story is a uniquely Hartford one. Elder (his friends called him Bill) Prince was born in Americus, Georgia. In 1952, at age 12, he and his family joined the Second Great Migration of Southern Black families running from Jim Crow in the South, to jobs in the North. In Georgia, the Princes were sharecroppers. Americus, the county seat of Sumter, would later loom large in America’s civil rights history, but the Prince family headed north, where Hartford area factories were churning out firearms, airplanes, clocks, and pianos.
Bill Prince later got a job at the historic Colt’s Manufacturing, where he worked for 30 years. He married a Hartford girl, Mary Ann Jackson, who went on to be an educator, caseworker, and activist. A steady income allowed him to buy a small house on Cleveland, just off North Main.
To Bill Prince, life was neatly divided into before and after the migration, his daughter said. To Bill Prince, she said, Hartford was heaven.
“You went from picking cotton — literally,” said Bridgitte Prince, “to working in a factory, saving up money to buy a nice new car, sending your children to schools where at least they were going to get the same books” as the white students. “It was that type of transformation.”
From her perch as a young woman, Bridgitte Prince watched Hartford’s election of the nation’s first popularly elected Black mayor, Thurman Milner, followed by the first Black woman mayor to be elected in a New England city, Carrie Saxon Perry.
“It was almost as if Hartford was extending reparations to Blacks, giving them that dream,” she said.
And in the fulfillment of that dream, it isn’t too much to ask that sewage go where it’s supposed to go. It isn’t too much to expect a dry basement. A few officials blamed climate change — bigger storms, bigger run-offs — but as Prince says, human feces is not floating into the basements of West Hartford or Essex or Greenwich.
“This has become like urban gun violence,” Bridgitte Prince said. “Now it is so routine, and people have the attitude, ‘Well, that’s what happens in the ’hood.’”
The push for a fix is being led by veterans, said Bridgitte Prince. It helps them to look at this as yet another campaign.
“I think about my experience as a soldier,” she said. “This is just a mission that I’ve been called to crusade and fight for.
“All these politicians have no problem sending us all around the world to fight against the inhumane injustices of other people, and they send billions to other countries to rebuild them,” Prince said. “And I come back to the land where I was born, and I’m saying, ‘Can we at least have some pipes where human waste is not meeting as if we’re going to a party in the basement?’
“‘Bridgitte, thank you for your service’ means what?”
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.