Recovery For Some Groton Homeowners Could Be Lengthy

The storm surge Monday dumped two truckloads of sand in Jim Tremble’s front yard, poured five feet of water in his garage and carried away his refrigerator. He has no idea where it is.

“It’s in the ocean somewhere,” he said. Or perhaps part of it wound up in Nancy Salerno’s garage on East Shore Avenue.

 Dan Tyler found part of a refrigerator in there, along with 12-foot logs, seaweed and peices of people’s docks. Joseph Sastre, Groton’s director of emergency management, said it could take a long time for some homeowners to recover from Hurricane Sandy, depending on the damage that was done.

 “Some people’s houses are screwed up because the water got in, their walls are soaked, their insulation is soaked . . . if they have furnaces in the basement, their furnaces are shot.”

“I’m sure there are houses out there with structural issues along the shoreline. It really comes down to what your issue is. . . Water can do a number on a house. It can make a house uninhabitable forever or without extensive repairs.”

Both the Tremble’s and Salerno’s houses seemed to have escaped structural problems. But others suffered ongoing water problems that could be more complicated.

Mark Shaw, owner of Custom Sitework in Mystic, who worked at the Salerno house with Tyler on Thursday, said he pumped water from a basement on Pearl Street in Mystic three times. The first two times, it came back in, at a rate of four inches an hour.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was expected to set up a Disaster Recovery Center in the Groton Senior Center in the coming days. Town Manager Mark Oefinger said an exact date for the center opening has not yet been set.

Meanwhile, neighbors with flooded basements piled sopping debris, furniture, toys, blankets and whatever else they had lost, along the curbs. Others continued to wrestle with large limbs and fallen trees in their yards.

Several roads remained impassable due to low-hanging wires, or both trees and wires down. Groton Public Schools canceled school for the fifth consecutive day.

Sally Motycka, of Pawcatuck, walked along the beach and picked up trash. She said that would be a useful activity for students.

“Kids that are out of school that are looking for something to do could fill one black trash bag,” she said. “Imagine that.” Tremble's house was hit from both directions, since it's between the ocean and a lagoon.

The two bodies of water met.  There were five refrigerators dumped on the roadside in Groton Long Point Thursday, and he checked them all, just to know, even though they wouldn't be usable. None was his.