Massive CT flooding prompts need to inspect bridges: 'That brook became a river'
SOUTHBURY — Dan Sammataro, with his hard hat and reflective
vest, was briefing DOT Inspection Team 1 one recent morning. It had been 10
days since the historic
thunderstorms pounded parts of Southwestern Connecticut, flooding the
nearby Stiles Brook that rose over a section of Route 6 and cascaded down the
driveway of the adjacent 19th century farmhouse.
Team 1 was there to check on Bridge Number 05420, a concrete
box culvert that drivers might not even notice on a regular summer day. But on
the afternoon
of August 18, the six-foot by 10-foot culvert clogged in the ferocious
flood when the suddenly raging river, 10-feet deep or more, topped the
road here about two miles north of the town’s center in its downhill race,
carrying broken trees and shrubs toward the Pomperaug River.
Sammataro was talking about the goals of the team's visit as
three bridge inspectors stepped into hip waders and rubber boots before they
crossed the two lanes and carefully made their way down the tons of freshly
installed rocks where the flood had taken away the bank of the now
one-foot-deep stream, about five feet wide. They were there for the fourth time
since the storms, to probe around and below the concrete to assure its
stability, as
southwestern Connecticut recovers from the disaster linked to three
deaths.
In the middle of the state highway, a hard-hatted DOT worker
was holding a stop sign, as the single lane of traffic traded the right of way.
A construction team was in the southbound lane of the little bridge, with
showers of sparks as they cut away sections of the metal guard rail that had
been twisted by the flood. A dump truck and backhoe were in place as the crew
of contractors continued the clean up.
The brook wasn’t exactly a slow summer trickle, but its flow
had reduced enough for Team 1 to hop the Jersey barriers, pick their way down
the slope of rip
rap and make their way into the two-lane-long culvert, where they
tested abutments and the concrete wings with a metal rod.
“We've been getting some decent rain events the two years
I’ve been here but obviously nothing of this nature,” said Sammataro, 38,
a supervising engineer for the DOT. “Last week we inspected it. There were some
repairs to the embankments and this is a follow-up.
Department of Transportation procedures kicked into place
that Sunday night, as agency officials closed the region's most-damaged bridges
and roads, then set up detours for traffic. For many locations, the state's
seven bridge inspection crews made multiple visits.
"We make reassessments and get into the channels too,
to probe and see if they are structurally undermined," Sammataro said,
recalling that Stiles Brook was still too high to fully inspect the culvert in
the days immediately after the 10 to 12 inches of rain caused the town's
historic flooding, the heaviest downpours in the state. Two women were killed
in Oxford. The body of a third victim, a Weston man, was found in
Westport.
Zach Lalima, a DOT bridge safety inspector with six years of
experience, held the six-foot probing rod, with markings every 12 inches for
measuring. In the front bib pocket of his waders was a folding ruler.
With him was Matthew Zoccali, a transportation engineer and Fahim
Nabizada, a bridge safety inspector who joined the agency a few months ago.
The inspection took about 15 minutes as nearby traffic
traded back and forth over the single open lane.
"We’re checking anything that has to do with
substructure, any washout running underneath and there wasn’t any," Lalima
said. "That’s like the main thing. So there is nothing structural
going on in this bridge. Everything is good. They fixed the channel and filled
everything in. Today, it's like it was back before everything started."
The term of art for the bridge inspection teams is
"scour critical." When bridges and culverts are designed, the DOT's
hydraulics and drainage department estimates their structural
capacities on a scale of one to nine. Those rated three or below are
classified scour critical, requiring crews to inspect them after major rain
events.
"There’s a large amount of data that goes into how they
are evaluating it," Sammataro said. "There is stream flow, flood
plain data. Scour critical means how susceptible the foundations are to
being undermined. In a storm event, how susceptible is this bridge to having a
structural issue where then foundations might be washed out? So, some designs
and channel configurations are less susceptible than others. Now, they are
trying to build structures where they wouldn’t be susceptible to things like
this. You’ll see us replace a smaller town bridge that might be scour critical
and the new design will push the abutments back away from the channel, so
there’s no substructure components even in the water or close to the channel
and it will improve its scour critical rating."
This culvert had little damage compared to the
quarter-mile section of Route 67 about two-and-a-half miles to the south, where
a brook filled a culvert and collapsed an abutment, diverting the flood and
closing a long portion of road adjacent to a town park.
"That's really the corridor that got hammered the worst
and then things branch off of it," Sammataro said. To the south and west,
Route 34 was still closed in Oxford and traffic was still being diverted on
Route 67 in Oxford, where the Little River left a corridor of destruction
into Seymour. "Any debris you could think of got washed into these
channels."
Back at their DOT van, parked in the driveway of the
farmhouse and red barn owned by Casey and Jeannette Chen, Lalima, Zoccali
and Nabizada went over the checklist of their observations.
"Outside of the guard rail and some of the stuff up top
I think underneath they should be OK," Sammataro said. "When they
probed last week they didn’t find anything. If they came out and probed this
and found that there was any undermining under the foundations or anything like
that, that’s one of the scenarios where we would close the structure. Or if the
channel bottom dropped out three feet when they went underneath and they
weren’t able to get in, that’s a scenario where we would send the divers in to
go look. So that’s kind of what we’ve been dealing with this week."
Just then, the Casey and Jeannette Chen drove up the
slightly sloping driveway, heading out for breakfast on the sunny morning.
During their nine years in the house, a former tavern with five fireplaces, the
nearby stream never come close to the kind of flood they saw that Sunday
afternoon. "That brook became a river," said Casey, who retired from
the fields of IT and architecture. "It was coming over the road literally
like a raging river coming over the hill," said Jeannette, showing a
reporter some video.
Fortunately the flood didn't threaten the house or barn as
it roared down the driveway they share with a neighbor, who is in the
construction industry and quickly patched the two-foot-deep holes gouged by the
swift brown water.
Sammataro was off to another bridge before heading to DOT's
headquarters in Newington.
"We’re doing our best trying to try to keep the roads
safe," he said. "You know that events like this can happen, but you
hope the next one is a long time away. Regardless of how anybody feels about
climate change, something is changing because the rain we get now is not like
what it used to be. We’re seeing it more and more, obviously not at the scale
we saw last week. but it’s a regular part of our life."
Stalled Bridgeport soccer stadium delays minor league team’s debut
BRIDGEPORT — Officials with the Connecticut Sports Group
acknowledged Friday what
had become obvious over the last few months — given ground has yet to
be broken on a stadium, their minor league soccer team will not be playing on
the lower East Side for at least another year and a half.
"After consulting with the league and local officials,
we have decided to debut the ... team in 2026," the organization, run by
entrepreneur Andre Swanston, said in a press release. "This additional
time will enable us to complete much-needed infrastructure work around the
stadium site and continue to build out our talented staff."
It was last October when Swanston
unveiled a multi-phase proposal to bring professional
soccer, along with housing and retail, to the former greyhound racing
track site on Kossuth Street along the Pequonnock River. By
January, Connecticut Sports Group said it had a minor league team,
Connecticut United, in place and was aiming to have a stadium erected in time
for the 2025 season, with a larger major league venue to come.
But financing has been an issue.
Swanston had sought an initial $30 million in state aid. So
far, only $16 million has been committed, mainly for cleanup of any
contaminated soil on the construction site and to create public access to the
waterfront, things that would need to be done ahead of any development on the
property should soccer fall through. Half
of that $16 million comes from the legislature's newly-created
Community Investment Fund, with
the balance made up of grants from the Connecticut Department of
Economic and Community Development for cleaning up old and contaminated
industrial sites.
Though supportive of Swanston, Gov.
Ned Lamont this year repeatedly expressed reservations about sinking
major state dollars into the soccer stadiums, arguing he would prefer to leave
that to private investors. Swanston has indicated he has significant private
funding in place but has been tight-lipped about budget details.
State Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport, a proponent of
bringing soccer to the city, said Swanston and allies need more time to
convince other state lawmakers about the merits of investing in the soccer
dream. He said the year's delay is "something a lot of us have seen coming
(but) it's in no way an admission of failure."
"I've seen what they've done and are prepared to do for
the city. I'm very excited for it," Felipe said of Swanston, Connecticut
Sports Group and Connecticut United. "I just think a few other people need
to be brought on board. ... But it's going to take more than the time that
would be allowed to have a stadium built in the next year."
Even if state officials issued the Connecticut Sports Group
a blank check, there would still be bureaucracy to deal with. The $16 million
in existing aid was authorized in June, but that did not mean the funds were
immediately forwarded to Swanston.
The $8 million from the Community Investment Fund was
technically awarded to the Bridgeport Economic Development Corporation, a
quasi-public nonprofit run by Edward Lavernoich, which can partner with the
city or private developers. Lavernoich this week said it will likely take
about four more months before the necessary paperwork and legal reviews are
finalized to free up that $8 million to spend.
"There's always strings attached when you're talking
about bigger grants you get from the state," he explained. "It takes
some time to figure out. These awards are always done 'in concept' and there
are always spots you've got to iron out. ... I expect we'll have grant proceeds
drawn down by the end of the year."
Lavernoich also acknowledged there are still plenty of
unknowns about the scale of the environmental remediation of the Kossuth Street
land, approximately 16 to17 acres in size, noting the property had "a long
history" of uses before the defunct greyhound track.
"This is a big, complicated site," he said.
"So there's going to be a mix of differential remedial methods that make
up the overall remedial plan."
The former greyhound property was purchased
in March 2022 by a limited liability company with ties to
Robert Christoph senior and junior, the father/son team that has spent
years redeveloping the nearby Steelpointe site on the harbor, home to Bass Pro
Shops, other smaller retailers, a new marina and Boca restaurant, with luxury
apartments under construction. Swanston has an undisclosed deal to control the
land for his needs.
State Rep. Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport has been
another supporter of Swanston's. He is optimistic the city's legislative
delegation might be more successful when the Connecticut General Assembly
reconvenes early next year in lobbying colleagues and the governor for
additional support to bring professional soccer to Bridgeport.
"I personally always felt it was an aggressive
timeline," Rosario said of having a minor league stadium in place by 2025,
noting the actual Connecticut United team was not announced until just before
the start of 2025's legislative session. "Should we all get reelected (in
November) we're going fresh, crafting a new biennial (state) budget. ... And
now this isn't kind of crammed in (and) has a lot better chance of moving
along."
Rosario continued, "I think I'm still 'glass half
full,' still optimistic. I still highly believe this project is going to
go forward. It's just facing a delay that unfortunately happens with these
big-type projects."