Some LI flooded residents need much more than cleanup

Somebody - no one knows who - spread twin rows of sand to keep water from running downhill to surround four of the still-flooded houses on Horton Avenue in Riverhead.

The makeshift dams don't work.

Neither does the Tilex and bleach that residents are using - nearly every day - in an attempt to corral a rapidly advancing legion of furry, ink-black mold. Eleven of the 15 flooded homes remain unoccupied.

As for the emergency Small Business Administration loans that officials welcomed recently with much fanfare, they may not be working for all of the Horton Avenue residents either.

Mary Allen, went to the fire department to apply for a loan. She was turned down, she said, because her job at a local eyeglass business doesn't pay enough. "They told me to call back in two weeks and see if there is some kind of grant available," Allen said Monday.

"Most of us won't be eligible for the SBA loans," said Linda Hobson, a social worker who has become the neighborhood's organizer. "Most of the people here are elderly and on fixed incomes."

SBA disaster loans are federally subsidized and can be used to repair or replace homes, personal property or businesses that sustained damages not covered by insurance. Among the qualification criteria considered by the SBA is financial information, including income, creditors, monthly payments and balances, according to FEMA's website.

For Allen, there'll be two more weeks of living with friends in one place, while her adult son lives with friends at another. Two more weeks of buying clothes to replace the ones that remain, like framed photographs of her children, coated in muck and mold in the house.

On her last visit, she relied on a friend with a large truck to drive into a couple of feet of stinking, standing water to deposit her on the back step of the house she rented for two years.

Allen didn't stop on the ground floor. The smell and the mold on the furniture, her television, a bed and other possessions, were too terrible. She made her way to the second floor, where she grabbed whatever she could. She didn't get to the urn bearing the ashes of her mother, Virginia, who died three years ago. "She's still there," said Allen, who will commemorate her mother's birthday Tuesday.

These days, there's more frustration and pain than anger on Horton Avenue, which has yet to dry out from a March 30 storm. For weeks, Hobson has been working with residents and officials in other Suffolk County neighborhoods damaged by the storm. On Saturday, they will come together at a meeting to make the case that the Federal Emergency Management Agency ought to be providing individual and other help since eastern Long Island was in the center of the storm.

Monday, a group of officials made another visit to the neighborhood. Among them was Theodore Fisch, region 1 director of the state emergency management office, who was making his first visit, and Jodi Giglio, a Riverhead town council member, who seemed to know everyone on the block. In separate interviews, they agreed on one thing.

Fixing homes won't be enough for Horton Avenue.

"The houses need to be raised up or they need to be moved," Giglio said.

That, according to state officials, would require a different kind of competitive federal grant program. Which is why, come Saturday, Fisch and two other state emergency management officials are planning to join a host of local, county and federal officials who have been invited to visit Riverhead.

Hopefully, they'll assure that Horton Avenue doesn't "fall through the cracks" because it's so small, as Hobson said she was warned by an official weeks ago.