James Breedlove saw the first floor of his Arlington Terrace house washed out in June 2006, when a wave of rank floodwaters swelled up from Cameron Run.
The retired barber’s situation was typical of the more than 150 working-class Huntington homeowners in the aftermath of the storm: thousands of dollars of property damage dealt, with no flood insurance.
On Thursday, Breedlove questioned why the Army Corps of Engineers would find the area ineligible formillions of dollars worth of projects that could prevent another calamity, while at the same time finding a nearby community meets the same threshold.
Belle Haven, a generally upper-class area that was flooded by Hurricane Isabel in 2003, is vulnerable enough to qualify for a $13 million levee and flood wall, the corps said this week. In November, the agency found a $24 million dredging and flood wall in Huntington didn’t meet the same cost-benefit standard.
“Of course it hurts, we were hit a lot harder than they were,” Breedlove said. “We feel like if anything’s done, we should be one of the first in line, along with [Belle Haven] — I wouldn’t take nothing away from them … we need something in Huntington.”
The two communities are little more than a mile away, but share little in common economically. Belle Haven, billed by one real estate agent as “upscale” and “prestigious,” is populated by large, elegant homes. By comparison, Huntington is far more modest.
“We have no millionaires,” said Henny Martinez, whose house sits a stone’s throw from Cameron Run on Fenwick Drive.
Martinez, who also had no flood insurance, lost her car and all the appliances in her basement during the 2006 storm. “I don’t understand why they cannot do it,” she said of the federal flood protections.
The reason comes down to math, said Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Chris Augsburger.
Belle Haven, according to the corps’ analysis, is likely to flood with greater frequency, and those floods have the potential to harm more structures of greater total value.
“We work diligently to ensure that the conclusions we draw are based on the best, most accurate information available,” Augsburger said. “With each project comes its own data, but the process we follow and the methods we use remain constant and equal.”
