After Fiona, N.L. residents wait anxiously to return home — or find themselves on the demolition list
Denise Pike Anderson pointed to the back corner of her basement.
“That’s where the water came in first,” she said, standing amid silt in the dark, damp remains of her Port aux Basques home last week.
Anderson is one of dozens of homeowners whose property incurred damage from post-tropical storm Fiona but wasn’t carried off by the sea completely.
Her house — although filled, at one point, with a metre of seawater after a monster storm surge in September — is still standing, battered but intact.
For four weeks, she believed it might’ve been salvageable, hoping provincial inspectors would tell her she could return and begin repairs.
Instead, she was summoned to town hall, where officials told her that her house was now officially condemned.
“It was just a blow,” she said, her voice cracking as she began to cry. “A blow to us that what we worked hard for is coming down.”
Her kids, she said, wanted to fly back to Newfoundland to help the family.
“And I said, ‘You can’t come home,'” she recalled. “We’re homeless.”
Anderson was one of several homeowners who learned late last month they were now officially on the demolition list, says Channel-Port aux Basques Mayor Brian Button.
“It’s been weeks of inspections, from structural to health,” Button said in an interview last week.
As people arrived to learn the fate of their homes, some of them broke down sobbing.
“It was pretty emotional at times here,” he said.
Almost 100 homes in the area were destroyed to the point of being uninhabitable, according to the provincial count in the days following Fiona.
The storm initially displaced about 200 people. Some of them have been staying with friends or relatives since late September. Fifty-nine people remained in shelter at a hotel as of Thursday, according to the Red Cross.
What to do with displaced residents is still a sticking point for Button — and one that officials haven’t yet figured out.
“We’re still worried about how this is all going to look,” Button said.
“We’re in … the winding-down of the construction season, and here we need to ramp it up. That’s the problem here right now.
“The storm took one day to do what it’s done, and it’s going to take us a whole lot more to try to get it all sorted out.”
Anderson said she knows it will be a long road to get to a new home to call her own. But in the meantime, she said, she’s hoping for a little more clarity from the provincial government.
“Put us in a room, the ones whose houses are being demolished, and have answers for us.” she said. “You gotta give us something so we can start to move on.”
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