When the Housatonic River threatened her home Aug. 28, firefighters warned Denise Koundry she should get to higher ground.
Not Thursday morning.
"It happened so fast, it's amazing," she said. "Generally the fire department will come and tell us, hey, it's gonna flood. That didn't happen so we were pretty confident going to bed. We woke up this morning. My husband said, 'Oh my god, it's coming in the house."
Her son Charles said authorities gave them just ten minutes notice. Up the street, the Fiore family was evacuating. When they rented the place in July, they had no idea the river would flood the house. In fact, they were using the finished basement as a bedroom for their daughters, until the Aug. 28 flood ruined it.
"We pulled all that out and put the damaged stuff to one side, cleaned all the floors, all the mud in there and everything."
They live downstream from Stevenson Dam. With the river above its major stage, above 20 feet, more than 50,000 cubic feet of Housatonic water roars through the flood gates per second.
"This is the third time in six months we've been flooded this badly," said Denise Koundry. "We were told when we bought the house it didn't flood. Does anybody want to buy my house?"
