BRIDGEPORT REPORT
By Reginald Johnson
BRIDGEPORT ----- Environmental
activists and a city council member say new construction in the Remington Woods
forest may have triggered the historic flooding which destroyed cars and
damaged homes in an East Side neighborhood earlier this month.
Homes along Ohio
Avenue and some nearby streets were hit by the massive flooding after two
downpours on June 30 and July 3rd, said Councilwoman Maria Pereira,
D-138.
Flooding two to
four feet deep engulfed cars and poured into basements, she said.
“Two cars were
totalled and two people had to be rescued by the fire department,” Pereira
said. “The city engineer told me that in his 20 years working for the city, he
had never seen anything like it.”
Some homeowners have
had to spend thousands of dollars to clean up, and in some cases, insurance
companies are refusing to pay for the damage, the council member said.
A meeting will take
place Thursday at 5:30 pm in the Thomas Hooker School to give residents a
chance to air their concerns about the flooding with city officials, Pereira
said.
The big mystery is
what caused the flooding in the neighborhood, which is in the northeastern
section of the city, off East Main Street. Oddly, Ohio Avenue, which crosses
East Main Street, was only flooded on the eastern end. The western side of the
street was untouched.
Instead of faulty
sewers causing the flooding, Pereira said the cause might be new construction at the Remington Woods tract which sits on the eastern end of the flooded area.
“This does not
appear to be raw sewage, but water with dirt and grit,” Pereira said of the overflow.
The Remington Woods
site --- 422 acres of mostly woods and a 22-acre lake ---- is owned by Corteva,
a subsidiary of DuPont, the giant chemical corporation. Corteva is planning light industrial development for the area.
In recent years,
Corteva has been conducting an environmental clean-up of the tract, which
contains munitions waste left by the Remington Arms company. The firearms
company, now owned by DuPont, had a factory in Bridgeport and used to test its
products at the woodlands site.
Environmentalist
Lela Florel is also suspicious that recent tree cutting and construction work in
the woods may have sparked the unprecedented flooding. Florel points to the
fact that Remington Woods is at a significantly higher elevation than streets
such as Ohio Avenue. Ohio Avenue is at 49 feet above sea level, while Remington
Woods sits at 62 feet to about 138 feet, she says.
“The woods is high!”
Florel said. “The water runs down. Either the Woods is left natural to absorb
it, or the neighborhood floods,” Florel said.
Pereira said
construction of a dam on the site might also have been a contributing factor.
Meanwhile, Florel,
Pereira and others in the group “Preserve Remington Woods” are fighting a
long-term battle to save Remington Woods from construction. The group is seeking
to have the city change the zoning designation for the tract from light
industrial to one “that specifies preservation of the entirety of the woods as
a Nature Wildlife preserve.”
Florel says the
tract is an environmental gem --- home to deer, fox, eagles, turkey and
thousands of large hardwood trees.
She and the other
advocates say it makes no sense to destroy the woods to make way for new
industry, when Bridgeport has so many vacant buildings that can be redeveloped
to provide the same thing.
Already, the city has granted a wetlands permit to Corteva to proceed with development. Florel says full-scale construction work could begin by the end of the year, unless the zoning is changed.
