Bridgeport scrambles to assess damage
A tornado inside a store. Chuck Nickels never saw anything like it.
The 2:20 p.m. twister flung open the double doors of the Contempo clothing store he manages. The wind trashed the store and then, eager to exit, it shattered the store”™s front window outward to the street in an explosion of glass and fashion.
“It was devastating,” Nickels said.
The cleanup after Bridgeport”™s June 24 mid-afternoon tornado was well under way the next morning and remained that way five days later. At press time, the city was gathering damage data with the prospect of earning federal help if the figure topped $4.5 million.
The mayor”™s office offered no estimate of damage, noting a pair of teams was surveying the city and the nearby county. The $4.5 million Federal Emergency Management Agency threshold is for countywide damage.
Nine buildings in the city sustained extensive damage in the storm, according to spokeswoman Elaine Ficarra, who said June 28, “We have no real estimate of the monetary damage.” Two damaged structures were quickly torn down ”“ “They were probably coming down anyway,” Ficarra said ”“ and another two were deemed uninhabitable, with their fates unknown.
Between 50 people and 100 people had turned to the city for assistance, but Ficarra said the number of those affected was likely greater. “We”™re trying to capture that number, but we know that many people sought help with family and friends,” she said. “People are still calling in.”
The event quickly put Bridgeport on the national news. More dramatically, the city earned a spot on the 2012 Forum, an apocalyptic website charting comets and nasty weather as harbingers of the end days.
For once, a trumpeted appeal associated with Bridgeport showman P.T. Barnum was not linked to exaggeration: “Donations are desperately needed,” his namesake museum said in a statement, “to help secure the museum building and then to replace and repair the portions of the collection that were damaged by the storm.”
Winds clocked at 100 mph battered a stretch of downtown the size of several football fields. Official estimates said the tornado damage was concentrated in a swath near Main Street 100 yards wide and about a half-mile long.
No one was killed, though about 30 people sought treatment for lesser injuries. The employees of the shoe store Footloose on Main Street watched as a bicyclist was swept away several seconds before their own storefront exploded, showering the store with glass to a depth of 45 feet.
A walking tour of the damage the day after revealed a common thread: No one had ever seen anything like it before.
Nickels has worked at Contempo Fashions Inc. at 1105 Main St. for more than nine of Contempo”™s 25 years in business. “I was inside,” he said from beside a shattered plate-glass window. “The wind blew the doors open. It circled inside the store. And then it blew the window and the merchandise out into the street. I never saw anything like it.” A pile of glass shards was all that remained of the window, although the store was open for business behind a barrier of yellow police tape.
“I”™ve never seen a storm do so much damage in such a short period of time,” said Mayor Bill Finch on the city”™s website. “Most of the damage was concentrated in the East Side and East End of the City. We”™re working with the governor and with our legislative delegation to seek federal disaster aid.”
New sycamore trees planted in front to the Fairfield County Courthouse toppled like dominoes. A courthouse Dumpster took flight a hundred yards before clipping Joe Marzan”™s vehicle, then smashing Marzan”™s Snappy Dawg hot dog stand, then smashing the windshield of his mother/business partner”™s truck and, finally, smashing a window in a downtown Rite Aid drugstore. “I never experienced anything like it,” said Janet Marzan, whose pickup lost its windshield.
Big players were affected, too, including Bank of America, which bore telltale plywood sheets where ground-floor windows had been.
At the Bridgeport Holiday Inn and Convention Center, which just completed a $10 million makeover, General Manager Bill McGarry said, “We fared a lot better than some of our neighbor buildings. I don”™t know why, but thank God ”“ no one was hurt.”