With severe thunderstorms forecast for overnight Monday, state officials continue a cleanup and assessment of last week’s deadly flooding damage, which is expected to take months to and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Teams of workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and federal Small Business Administration will start assessing storm damage to determine if it meets the requirements of a presidential disaster declaration. If it does, it will make storm victims eligible for federal aid that should greatly help them, Turner said. Such determinations usually take months. Exactly how much the recovery from this storm will cost taxpayers also won’t be determined for some time, but it will be a large figure, Turner said. Lamont visited Seymour on Monday with Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Daniel O’Keefe to announce his plan to allocate $5 million in state funding to a grant program for storm victims. Grants of up to $25,000 will be available for small businesses and nonprofit organizations in Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties that had flood damage. The applicants must have fewer than 100 employees. Damage cleanup and inventory replacement are among the items the grants will fund, the governor said.
https://ctexaminer.com/2024/08/26/state-faces-long-road-to-recovery-as-flood-damage-assessment-begins/