Horton Avenue residents talk of post-flood struggles

Standing in the street outside her still-flooded home on Horton Avenue in Riverhead, Joyce Anderson, 48, talked of weeks of frustration over the inability to get help from any level of government for her problem.

She talked of living each day without heat and with little hot water, and of a basement that has been flooded since March and is growing moldy.

"I'm tired," she said. "It's horrible . . . it makes me so mad. You can see money going everywhere else, but you can't get help in your own town."

Actually, help is on the way, but it's from local volunteers - none of it from federal, state or local assistance programs. Federal flood assistance is geared to such things as helping municipalities deal with the cost of pumping away floodwaters, putting in new drainage systems and replacing washed-away sand on beaches - not the problems of a few homeowners, such as those on Horton Avenue.

But Town Councilwoman Jodi Giglio has been sewing together her town's social safety net on an informal basis so that Anderson should have heat and hot water back fully next week.

Giglio got Blackman Plumbing's Riverhead store to donate a new heater, and found a town police officer who does plumbing on the side to volunteer to inspect Anderson's old system and sign a paper declaring it inoperative.

Then Leroy Barnes, the town's chief building inspector, had to make arrangements for a new heating system to be installed, and the old one removed.

Giglio also had to coordinate with an emergency relief fund being collected at the First Baptist Church to pay for the installation work.

Still, none of that helps fix the 2 or 3 feet of water in her basement.

Anderson, who lives with her brother and her son, has got by since March using an electric hot-water heater. But to get enough water for a shower she has to turn it on, wait five or 10 minutes to shower, then turn it off again.

And, in a way, she is lucky. Her house is on a relatively high point of Horton Avenue, one of 19 damaged in the March storms. The nine families who still have not been able to return to their homes live lower down, between a little lake and a wetland and just north of a bigger sump that collects water and drains to a still-lower point.

Linda Hobson, a community advocate who represents the nine families still not able to return to their homes - and herself an owner of one of the nine uninhabitable homes - said it is hard to swallow there's no public aid.

"We get no assistance. I've lived in four different locations in the last nine weeks. The families we live with are being distressed . . . it's not fair to them," she said.

Hobson said she was offered a 5.25 percent federally subsidized loan to help pay for repairs, but she was reluctant to make that 30-year commitment as she now lives mortgage-free. The loan, she said, would become a new mortgage. "I'd pay $480 a month for 30 years . . . by the time it was paid off, I'd be 74," she said.