In a matter of fewer than three hours on July 17, the normally placid brook running under Chase Hill Road swelled roughly 12 feet over its banks and sent a cascade of debris and racing water toward Taft Pond Road.
The water undercut the road’s edges and infiltrated under pavement until several hundred feet on one side collapsed prompting an hours-long closure of Taft Pond Road from the intersection of Chase Road to the nearby Windham 4-H campgrounds.
“No one can ever recall this happening here before,” First Selectwoman Maureen Nicholson said. “That this little stream would jump its banks like it did — there was no way to predict that. We were told by the (state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection) that this kind of flooding only happens there once every 100 years.”
And while a handful of nearby towns — including Eastford and Ashford — also endured hours of pounding, damaging rain that day, residents from neighboring towns reported next to no precipitation and certainly not the kind of punishing rainfall that carved deep ruts into roads and washed over bridges.
“We’re still doing repair estimates, but it could be as high as $100,000 to fix Taft Pond Road and some of the dirt roads in town that were damaged,” Nicholson said. “We have public works funds, as well as town road aid we get from the state, but using that money means we would have to short other road projects.”
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Nicholson said she’s reached out to local state lawmakers for guidance and sent a preliminary damage estimate to officials at the Region 4 section of the Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, which covers the eastern portion of the state, ahead of possible federal reimbursement of the repair work.
“That would cover 75% of the costs, but in order for the money to be approved, the entire county would need to hit the threshold for disaster relief,” Nicholson said.
Nicholson said she suspects heavy rain from earlier storms — including the remnants of Tropical Storm Elsa on July 9 — compounded the July 17 damage by not allowing new rain to soak into the ground.
“The state’s still looking at the Elsa storm (disaster relief) numbers, but, in my opinion, damage from the July 17 storm is directly connected to the earlier one,” she said.
The town plans to chop away approximately 800 feet of jagged pavement from Taft Pond Road in the coming weeks before adding new fill and repaving damaged sections. Several dirt roads in town, including North Road, were also damaged as channels of water cut 4- to 5-foot gaps in some sections.
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Nicholson said crews will fill in the open channels of damaged dirt roads with processed stone and re-grade the areas. She said the unpaved roads aren’t as frequently traveled as their paved counterparts, but still require attention.
“If you don’t get them taken care of, the next round of rain will get in there and quickly erode them,” she said. “These are roads used as cut-throughs and we need to ensure emergency vehicles can get through.”
Nicholson said the sort of weather events that led to the road damage seem to be coming with increasing frequency in the state and across the country.
“The danger with climate change is we’re likely to see more and more of these kinds of issues and that’s going to take some long-range planning to address,” she said. “That might mean paving these dirt roads, especially the hilly ones that are incompatible to water flow.”
July is already ranking as one of the wettest months on record in Connecticut with nearly 10 inches already hitting the ground — about seven inches above the normal level.
Back-to-back heavy rain events slammed the region even before Elsa and the following week’s storm hit towns like Ashford. First Selectwoman Cathryn Silver-Smith said the July 17 storm damaged “every road in town.”
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“It was unprecedented,” she said. “Those storms uprooted trees, flooded basements and sent landscaping floating away. The ground was so soaked by previous storms, it couldn’t take in any more.”
Silver-Smith said it’s expected to take town crews another four to six weeks to finish repairs.
“And it’s not just the surface that needs repairs, because there was dirt washed away from under the pavement,” she said. “We don’t have cost estimates yet and we’re still assessing the damage. Our crews are exhausted. They and the fire department were out there at the height of the storm doing what they could, so pray for us that there’s not another storm.”
John Penney can be reached at jpenney@norwichbulletin.com or at (860) 857-6965
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