Get Your Damage Counted, Fed Aid At Stake

Will Norwalk meet Federal Aid thresholds? No one knows, and in order to find out the city’s office of emergency management wants to find out. To do so, they’ve created an assessement survey, oddly entitled, Pre Disaster Assessment survey. But hey, give Michele DeLuca credit, she used SurveyMonkey to get a quick online survey done, er, quickly.

Federal and state aide for both residents and the City of Norwalk get triggered as a result of the total monetary damage incurred. Mayor Richard Moccia made an automated robocall to alert residents to the need to assess the damage city-wide. All the data needs to be tabulated and assessed in order for the City to turn its report by  March 22nd. That means, get cracking. Assuming you have power. But you can still use your mobile, especially if you’re reading this.

The official statement is that all this collecting of info becomes part of the damage assessment used to make a case for state and federal assistance.

You can click over to the City Web Site, for additional disaster information, and they want you to click on the March Storm link, inexplicably buried in the navigation mid page. Really, such utter laziness on the part of the City IT staff.

That link would be  www.norwalkct.org and click on the March Storm Update link and then onto Pre-Disaster Assessment Survey for the survey.

You can apparently email the answers to the questions, but they’d prefer if you used the online survey. As a last resort, you can call the Norwalk Emergency Management office at 203 854 0238.

One interesting thing on the Emergency page popped out:

Question:

Why wasn’t the City’s response quicker?

Answer:

We will review both the community response and the CL and P response as part of our After Action Review. At that time we will review all elements of the response and will develop strategies to improve our local response capabilities.  It is important to note that this storm produced a record amount of damage. The winds were less than a hurricane but due to the heavily saturated soils the damage we experienced was equivalent to a Category 1 or 2 hurricane. It should be noted that hurricanes come with 3-4 days notice and the 3:00pm forcast on Friday and the 11:00 am forecast on Saturday, March 13 called for 20 – 30 mph winds with gusts to 45. The next update at 6:45 pm on Saturday was for 50 mph winds with gusts to 60mph. By this time the city’s response was in full swing.

Once the scope and severity of the storm was understood all three major departments geared up quickly for a coordinated  prolonged response.

So there you have it, blame the weather reports.