NORTH BRANFORD — Heavy winds and rains from Sunday into Monday morning was almost like déjà vu for town officials.
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This latest drenching followed last week’s storm that dumped 6 inches of rain and forced evacuation of residents in a mobile home park after the Farm River overflowed its banks.
But luckily it wasn’t a repeat of the flooding caused by the downpour the previous weekend. North Branford Town Manager Michael Downes was somewhat relieved during a break in the storm mid-morning Monday.
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While the sun came out briefly, Downes noted that roads closed earlier in the morning were open or close to opening.
There were nine separate downed tree events, which caused “road interruptions.” Three involved electrical wires, he added. Downes noted the ground was still saturated from last week’s deluge.
“Almost all of those are clear at this point,” he said about the roads.
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The town also lucked out with limited power outages, he said. “Outages we’ve had, luckily just small pockets so far” caused by isolated fallen trees and wind.
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“It’s a big win so far,” he said about the latest storm.
However, after last week’s storm, town officials were keeping their eye on “rain and flooding,” Downes said, adding that they were monitoring four flood-prone areas.
Those include Walnut Lane, East Pond Road area, West Pond Road, Country Road and the intersection by Totoket Road and Mill Road.
“We’ve got eyes right now on Totoket Valley” Mobile Home Park, Downes said. “Right now, the water hasn’t risen as high as it did last week but we’re still keeping our eyes open in case we have to do a repeat of what happened in terms of evacuation. But right now, we’re not there.”
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“Basically, the reality is we’re calling these kind of weather events unusual weather events. But the unusual seems to be getting to be more and more usual,” he said.
According to North Branford Interim Fire Chief Anthony Esposito the Farm River area on Totoket Road is historically prone to flooding, but nothing as extreme as last week’s rainfall since the mid-1990s, he said.
He noted that the state Department of Transportation had replaced the aging bridge over the Farm River on Route 80 in recent years and did work downriver in East Haven. “That kind of mitigates some of the downstream clogging” of the riverway, he said.
“It was up over the banks … for sure,” Esposito said about last week’s river surge. “It was funny, as fast as the river rose, once the rain stopped it receded.”
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“We put a cone up” to mark the flood area,” he recalled, “Like 30 feet from where it was.” He was meeting a television news crew there an hour and a half later. But there was no water.
He told the TV crew, “’Believe me there was flooding here this morning.’ There was no obvious sign of anything going on.”
In the last week’s storm, the residents’ homes did not get flooded as they are two to three feet off the ground, he noted.
The fire department was more worried “about access.”
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“The way the river was rising so fast it was ‘let’s get them out of here before it gets worse,’” he said.
“It’s just the water, the force of nature — impossible to do anything with,” Esposito said.
Downes agreed. The storm the week before, with “five and six inches of rain falling in just a 13-hour window… was pretty much too much for anything to handle.”
“I think the magnitude of what we experienced — I don’t know if they characterize it as a 50-year or 100-year storm — I think those characterizations are meaningless at this point,” Downes said.
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“It's definitely an unusual weather event when we get that much rain,” he said.
Businesses in Totoket Center Plaza had been flooded out in recent years.
During an Aug. 27 storm when tornadoes touched down in the state, “we had a storm cell that blew through here and it did do a lot of damage here. We had a lot of trees down, a lot of damage, some water damage from that,” Downes noted.
A few weeks before that tropical storm Isaias Aug. 4 wrought havoc in that area as well.
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Part of the problem that much development in the Farm River area is in a flood zone and predates zoning in town in 1950, he said.
“The Totoket Center plaza dates to 1953 so yes, it definitely predates local zoning ... The use for the trailer park also predates local zoning,” Downes said.
The DOT replaced the Farm River bridge some five years ago, which had more to do with the roadway, improving traffic and drainage, he said.
“I think it’s overall helped with the conditions down there," Downes said.
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“It's unusual to see something like this of this magnitude down there,” he added.
Still, the town should look into the matter, he said. “ I think we are taking a look at it, certainly if there’s improvements that need to be made, we definitely want to assess that.”
“I think we have a responsibility to kind of check this out and see if there isn’t more that needs to be done. At least make an evaluation of it.”
If there’s improvements that need to be made on that property, it’s probably going to fall to them. But if there is something we can do relative to the infrastructure we’re going to want to look at it.”
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