Here in Waterbury, folks are now dealing with their third flood in the past year. If you remember, in December it also flooded here. The water Wednesday night was certainly not as bad as one year ago, or Hurricane Irene, but it was still high enough to flood basements and give folks a couple big headaches waking up Thursday morning.
“It’s surprising it keeps happening. It’s … I really didn’t think it was going to happen this time,” said Waterbury Landlord Mike Early.
Early owns a house on Elm Street that he rents out to tenants, and when he realized Wednesday night that the flood was going to hit Waterbury a little worse than expected, he and his wife drove down from Burlington to monitor the situation.
By the time they got there, Early said he was “walking through, you know, waist-deep water just to get in here.”
Plenty of other buildings on the low-lying street faced similar fates, with multiple feet of mud and water flowing into their basements.
For Early, his mission over the last two days has been drying out the basement to get his building back up to code and allow his tenants back in.
Early said, “Luckily their apartments weren’t touched, but the basement needs to be dry. My sons showed up and brought me clean clothes because I was literally soaking wet walking in waist-deep water just to be able to get into the basement and start hauling stuff out, so.”
With this being Waterbury’s third flood in the past year, more people are starting to weigh the tough question of whether to continue owning property or living in a river town, and for Early, he says this flood was the final straw.
“Yeah, after all this time I think I will be probably looking to sell this place, because I can’t constantly be coming over here dealing with this problem if this is going to become a regular thing,” Early said. “It’s a great town and everybody’s so supportive, but it’s very frustrating.”
