The Winthrop town government has invited residents affected by the storm-driven flooding to file claims against the town’s insurance carrier, while still developing its understandings and public explanations about the underlying causes and costs of the problem.

The flooding hit several homes in Winthrop early on February 23, when a power outage due to the snow storm overwhelmed Winthrop’s ability to stop water flows coming from Revere, breaking underground water mains in multiple parts of the town.

Photo Credit: Olivia Skomro

Town officials issued several written updates on the situation in the following week, though with limited detail. In their chief explanation, on the day of the storm, the town officials issued a summary that attributed the flooding to power outages affecting control valves designed to relieve pressure on the water system.

Town officials “briefly shut down water service town-wide in order to backfeed the system from Deer Island,” they said. The town has not explained that further publicly, though the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which controls the Deer Island sewage plant, was described as having both re-routed its own water supplies to spare Winthrop residents from prolonged water outages, and supplied the MWRA’s own work crews during a blizzard to help Winthrop repair its burst water mains. The state-run MWRA was not credited in the official town updates.

Backup system

Winthrop does not appear to have backup systems for shutting the water control valves in the event of a power outage, and town officials did not discuss that matter in their statements.

Winthrop had seven water main breaks town-wide in the storm, town officials said. The flooded homes include several in the Girdlestone Road area, which already was flood-prone due to rising sea levels and failures to fix blockages and other problems in the pipe system.

Residents of the Girdlestone neighborhood and beyond, including members of the town’s Citizens Advisory Commission on Climate, have called on the town to address such problems, at an estimated cost of tens of millions of dollars. Some of them have criticized town leadership for risking the necessary state funding by fighting over a state housing expansion law, known as 3A, that courts already have upheld as legitimate and that the overwhelming number of Boston-area communities have accepted.

The water main leaks were fully repaired this past Wednesday, when both the water and power service were restored across the town, the town officials said.

Insurance suggested

On Thursday, town officials said in a separate statement that affected residents were advised to contact the town manager’s office “to begin the process to file insurance claims through your insurance company and subrogation to our insurance carrier.”

The Town Council’s president, Jim Letterie, and the town manager, Anthony Marino, did not respond to requests for information on the events, beyond Mr Marino rejecting a resident’s suggestion that the water main breaks might have been related to the decision ahead of the storm to close the roadway between Revere and Winthrop.

The council’s vice president, Suzanne Swope, held a public question-and-answer session this past Wednesday at which she described Mr Letterie holding meetings with other council members over the storm and its damage but said she did not have any details to share. Describing the discussions, Ms Swope said: “Jim talked to the Town Council members – he called them to try and figure out what’s going on and how they’re doing.”

The town was expected to spend about $500,000 on the effects of the storm this past week, including costs of the water main problem, Ms Swope told residents at her question-and-answer session. That figure is up from about $300,000 that the town spent on a larger snowfall a month earlier, which already exceeded the approximately $200,000 that the town of Winthrop budgets annually for the cost of clearing snow from roadways that serve motor vehicles, she said. The spending difference likely will be covered by the general town budget, she said.

The town of Winthrop experienced another power outage this past Saturday when a utility worker suffered an electrical shock while working on elevated power lines in Revere.