'Trying to find solutions.' City of Bridgeport responds to neighbors' flooding concerns, residents frustrated
The city is in the process of reaching out to the state for more money to fix the problem
Bridgeport officials say the city is doing everything in its power to help mitigate the flooding problem on Savoy Street during rainstorms, but residents who live there aren't sold.
"Are we going to be alive when this problem is resolved?" neighbor Dale Foti says. "That's what I would like to know."
On Monday, News 12 reintroduced the decadesold problem plaguing some neighbors in the North End.
On Tuesday, the city of Bridgeport finally responded, sending public works crews and officials from the WPCA to the neighborhood.
"We are listening to the problems," says Bridgeport Public Facilities Director Luis Burgos, "and we're trying to find solutions to the problems."
Residents say flooded basements are a certainty during rainstorms on Savoy Street partly because the neighborhood resides at the bottom of two hills and there aren't enough storm drains.
"It is an issue for the homeowners," Burgos says. "I would hate to be dealing with an issue like that."
Burgos says the biggest problem is the part of nearby Ox Brook that overflows during rainstorms, which sends water into the street. He says the city can't do much on its own to fix the problem long-term because the city has limited access as the brook flows through dozens of homeowners' properties.
"If you have three or four properties, and you have one culvert... if one homeowner doesn't allow access to it, we really cannot get to it because we are going to create damage to their landscaping, or whatever the case may be," Burgos says. "It's really hard to clean out an entire culvert."
The city is in the process of reaching out to the state for more money to fix the problem, according to Burgos, but with no short-term solution on the table, neighbors remain frustrated.
Foti says the flooding problem will only get worse with the new apartments being built up the street at the site of the old Testo's.
"If you can't fix it, go to the governor or go to the state," Foti says. "Fix the problems for us. If you can't fix them, please give us generators just in case we have a power outage."
"We have to look into that," Burgos says. "Because we don't know what we're facing and how many generators we're actually going to be able to provide."
