Tammany Flats residents ready to pack up and leave

Three floods in 18 months takes a financial and emotional toll

By FRITZ MAYER

TAMMANY FLATS, PA — Donna Verderber owns a house in Tammany Flats, which, from the outside, looks like a pleasant place to live. But she can’t live there now because the floors are covered with mud, and the place is full of mold and mildew. The walls will need to be replaced, along with the insulation behind them, because of the damage done by the 3.5 feet of water that invaded her single-story ranch. She will also need new appliances.

Verderber and her husband watched the water rising on Tuesday, June 27. When there was an inch of water covering the single entrance to the 12-house community on the banks of the Delaware River, they decided it was time to go. They alerted their neighbors, and most left shortly thereafter. Four residents did not leave immediately and were taken out by rescue crews several hours later.

It’s the third time in 18 months that Verderber has been through this exercise, though the damage this time was worse than before.

Most of the families in the community have not returned to their homes because of health concerns, and according to Verdermer, some who did are probably living in unhealthy conditions.

Verderber, who is staying in a friend’s cottage, said the flooding is taking a toll. She said, “The first person who comes along with $150,000 can have this house.”

Julie Weisberg and Nina Regevik, who own a house down Tammany Flats Road a bit, feel the same way. They put their house on the market just a couple of weeks before the flood of 2006 invaded the riverside structure. This time, the water rose six feet inside their home, much more than in September of 2004 and April of 2005. They rebuilt after each of the previous floods with some help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). “But,” said Weisberg, “They never give you full value. Each time, I put at least $50,000 of my own money into rebuilding. It’s financially devastating to just about everybody here.”

At another house on the road, contractor Steve Ostrander and his crew were making extensive repairs to a house for the third time. “In the first flood,” he said, “there was just water in the basement. The next time, there was three inches on the main floor. This time, there was three feet on the main floor.”

Ostrander blames part of the devastation on releases from upstream reservoirs and the fact that the riverbed is not cleaned out as it was in decades past.

“In the ‘70s,” he said, “trucks would go onto the riverbed in August, when the water was low, and take out truckload after truckload of dirt and stones.” He said this was done under the supervision of Pennsylvania state inspectors. Such practices ended long ago. Ostrander, Verderber and Weisberg all agreed that the repeated and extensive flooding was a new phenomenon, something that simply had not happened in the past.