Towns Create Roadmap For Long Term Recovery

(Host) The damage done by Tropical Storm Irene happened in a flash. Emergency repairs to reconnect the state's roads, bridges and communications also happened relatively quickly.

Now the hard questions begin, and some of the hardest ones have to do with fixing people's lives and restoring property that no longer exists.

VPR's Susan Keese reports on one group of towns' efforts to create a roadmap for doing that.

(Keese) Dave Kaneshiro grew up in Hawaii, but he lived for 30 years on Water Street in Jamaica. The house where he raised his children stood its ground for 125 years.

(Kaneshiro) "Except this year."

(Keese) Kaneshiro's was one of four houses lost on Water Street when Tropical Storm Irene scoured out the land beneath them. All four were smashed to pieces against a bridge a little ways downstream.

(Kanishero) "It was quite an experience to see your home go away, just like that."

(Keese) Since then Kaneshiro, who works part time at Stratton, has been in temporary quarters at the mountain's employee lodge. Normally at this time of year, he'd be up with the sun, working in his garden. Now he's in a kind of limbo.

(Kaneshiro) "You might want to call it shock, but it's also the process of adjustment. The reality of the whole thing is that, your life has changed. Your home's gone. The land under your home's gone and you've got to start over somewhere, somehow."

(Keese) Today he's taking a small step. He's come to the offices of the Stratton Foundation, to discuss his situation with the nonprofit's two newest employees: Dorset Representative Patti Komline and Al Rogers, a retired businessman.

The community foundation is coordinating fundraising, volunteers, and the efforts of other local service groups. It's also trying to make sure everyone in the region who needs help gets it.

Komline and Rogers have found a cottage where Kaneshiro can settle in, for six months, while he figures out what's next.

Rogers says the coalition is working with almost 50 families - and seven of them lost their homes altogether.

(Rogers ) "But our number one objective is to put a financial strategy together to help put people back in their homes again."

(Keese) Rogers and Komline say the road to that goal is marked with questions that don't yet have answers. But Komline says they're learning as they go.

They've been working with FEMA and with local towns, sorting out details of a program called "hazard mitigation." Komline says it may provide help in cases where the $30,000 maximum FEMA grant doesn't make a dent in the person's real need.

(Komline) "There's a buy-out option for people who've lost their homes, who have more than 50 percent damage. The feds give 75 percent of the assessed value of someone's home. The town has to broker the application or the deal, and then the town owns the property, and it can never be built on again."

(Keese) Komline says that has serious implications for a participating town's tax base, because the land goes off the tax rolls. But the owner can use the money to build in another location, or to buy a home.

Representative Oliver Olsen is on the board of the Stratton Foundation, and part of a special board made up of community members, who will decide how to allocate the flood funds.

He says one of the things he's trying to do is help hook up homeowners with people who might donate labor or material.

(Olsen) " So the goal is to try to come up with a package that leverages as many resources as are out there, to be able to draw on those resources to pull them into a package,"

(Keese) Olsen says towns from Waterbury to Wilmington have been forming their own long-term recovery groups, which are sharing advice among themselves and state agencies.

Committee members say it could be spring, or later before checks are issued - assuming it all works out. But they say people shouldn't make big decisions anyway, so soon after a disaster.

For VPR News, I'm Susan Keese.