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

Brian Lockhart

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."