At the Riverbrook Regional YMCA’s Wilton Family Y Branch, last month’s flood waters may have receded but they left a lot more long-term damage in their wake. It will take a long time for the Y to recover and rebuild and that effort will carry a very hefty price tag — upwards of $4.2 million.
GOOD Morning Wilton spoke to YMCA officials, who gave us an idea of what happened during the floods and what they need to do to clean up. Although the Y is no stranger to flooding, this time the damage was more extensive than ever before. They’re hoping that the Wilton community will be there for the Y in the same way that the Y has been there for the community.
Related story: “As Wilton’s YMCA Faces $4.2 Million in Flood Damage, a Look at History Might Reveal Why it was Bound to Happen”
When the rain started to fall on Sunday, Aug. 18, the Y’s parking lot started to fill up quickly. By about 1 p.m., officials onsite decided it was in the best interest of safety to close early and evacuate.
“The first call that I received was from Rossvin [Badilla], our senior director of buildings and grounds, and Samantha Lusher, who’s our chief operations officer. They said that they had made the decision that they were going to close our building and evacuate because the water levels of the river were rising rapidly,” Riverbrook Regional YMCA CEO Christene Freedman recalled.
“Immediately after that, Rossvin started sending videos, and when he posted the video of a refrigerator floating across the Wilton Little League baseball field, across our parking lot, into the pond, we knew this was a serious situation,” Freedman added.
Badilla had seen flooding there before but nothing like the 3.5 feet of water from the Norwalk River that now rushed through the property, filling the parking lot and spilling over onto the baseball fields, the playground, the beach and the pond.
“The water was covering everything, you couldn’t even see the sand. Everything was really bad. Everything was basically floating around the pond. It was a very sad situation, knowing how hard we work to keep this place nice and clean for everybody who uses it, to see that following day, on Monday, to see such a big disaster,” Badilla said.
“It looked like a war zone,” Freedman added.
One major feature that took a hit was the 50-meter outdoor pool. The week before the flood, the YMCA staff had taken it offline for its annual maintenance, emptying the pool, servicing all the equipment, repainting it and filling it up again. They’d aimed to open by Monday, Aug. 20, but couldn’t once they had to deal with the immediate damage from the flood. But they did eventually reopen the pool Wednesday.
“Wednesday night, that’s when we found out that there was a big issue with the pool. We were losing a lot of water, and we ended up closing the pool to investigate what was happening. Right now, we’re working to see what has occurred, how damaged is the structure? It was definitely related to the storm,” Badilla said.
On top of the cost of the damage, not having a working 50-meter pool adds insult to injury.
“Now we are in the situation where we’re losing revenue — the pool is a revenue source for us, with our swim teams, with our members utilizing it, and we’re getting ready for swim meet season starting in October. Those are large revenue makers for our YMCA that support our staff salaries, that support our financial aid programming,” Freedman said. “So we really want to have this investigation completed as soon as we can, because we need this 50-meter pool back open in operation as soon as we can.”
Tallying everything damaged or lost from the storm, Freedman and her team reached an astounding figure.
“We realized that we had $4.2 million in damages with lost equipment, damage to our structures, our paddle courts, the pavilion, our storage sheds,” Freedman said. “It’s a lot.”
Unfortunately, most of the 16-acre property and structures on it are not insured.
“When it comes to insurance, you need a roof and four walls to be considered a structure. There is no structure here,” Wilton YMCA Director of Advancement Jarred Barnes said, spreading his arms wide and gesturing around the property. “So for us, there is no flood insurance for our grounds.”
It may also be difficult to secure financial aid, even with FEMA and state officials eager to help those impacted by the storm and flood.
“When it comes to state, federal and local, we know it’s a little bit different for us, because we are a nonprofit. So it isn’t one where, right away, FEMA is going to be able to cover anything. We have to go through additional layers to see whether or not,” Barnes added.
As a result, the YMCA team has created an emergency fundraising campaign called Restore Rebuild Recover.
“By the end of the year, we’re trying to respond, recover and rebuild here at the Y, and we have a $1 million campaign through the end of the year. There’s so much we need to do to be ready for spring of 2025 and getting all those summer campers back, having the memories, making sure that we are ready. We are the heart of the community. We want to be there for everyone else,” Barnes said.
In addition, the Y will schedule several volunteer days where they hope community members will come to the Y and pitch in with cleanup and rebuilding. One such day has already attracted several dozen people.
“We had 30 community members. We also had members from our Y as well as members from the local Rotary Club and our Kiwanis Club come together. They dug lifeguarding chairs out from the sand, they dug out our hanger system for life jackets, other things that were buried — our fence posts that were cemented in and that got uplifted during the storm and the broken fence, they had to roll that up, cut the wires, roll these big pieces of cement. They moved everything from the beach area and they re-mulched our playgrounds. Our preschool starts next week, so we wanted to get ready for our early childhood youth that are coming in. So there was a lot of work to be done, and we’re so appreciative that the community came together to help our YMCA,” Freedman said.
In addition to looking out for volunteer days, the Y officials hope that the community responds to the urgent million-dollar campaign.
“We want to make sure when the community is in need, we are there. It’s flip-flopped this time around, which is really different for all of us,” Barnes said. “We want to make sure that we’re always there for you.”