Flooding is an annual rite of spring at the Mattabesett Canoe Club in Middletown, but when rising waters caused by hurricanes Irene and Lee hit the restaurant in late August, it was unexpected.
The restaurant was forced to shut down for three weeks, reopening Sept. 15. That left management of the riverside restaurant located along a busy stretch of Route 9 looking for new ways to deal with an old problem: maintaining a steady customer base.
Given the restaurant’s location right on the edge of the Connecticut River, owner Danny Cronin said it was inevitable that he would have to deal with flooding. He took over in August 2010.
“You look at the risk involved in that, and you try to analyze it,” he said. “’Can we absorb it? Can we deal with it?’ And we’re can-do guys and we said, ‘yeah, no sweat.’ ”
Cronin said while the key is to have effective levels of insurance to minimize the risk, you also have to determine if you have the stomach for it.
“We had two floods in a week,” he said. “That’s never happened before, never mind during the August time frame. We prepared for spring flooding, and we thought we lucked out this year, only to find out we would get two at the end of the season.”
With Irene, the Canoe Club, which was formerly known as America’s Cup and a host of other names, had water up to the bar level on its ground floor. Days later with Hurricane Lee’s remnants, about six to eight inches of water came into the bottom level.
Cronin said his team kept an eye on both storms to help prepare.
“You have to realize that Mother Nature is unpredictable,” he said. “We had ample warning on when the river was going to crest, so we had time to move furniture.”
Cronin said he used some sandbags to reduce the amount of water that came into the ground floor, but that can only help to a point.
“Once you hit six inches (of water), all bets are off — water is coming in,” he said. “Right now I’m trying to evaluate, based on this experience. When spring comes, I might bring in more experts to tell me what they would do.”
To deal with the most recent flooding, Cronin decided to get directly involved with the cleanup.
“We took a cue from the previous owner who was a hands-on guy, and we evaluated the cost,” he said. “We said we’re hands-on and we’ll do it ourselves.”
After consulting some professionals, Cronin said he learned it’s not all about bringing out the wet-vacs. The issue with this storm wasn’t the water — it was the large amount of silt left behind.
“The answer was to fill it up with more water, bring in hoses and squeegees and squeegee it out,” he said. “You bring in fans and dehumidifiers and bring in the sanitation experts to prevent mold.”
Cronin said he hired professional sanitation experts to make sure the business was ready to reopen.
He used some of his own staff members, plus day workers from the local staffing agency Labor Ready, to clean up the flooding aftermath.
Chef Leyn “Roger” Aliega, who began working at the business under its previous ownership in 1999, was one of those helpers. Aliega said he’s learned over the years that moving all transportable furniture from the ground floor is the key to reducing the amount of cleanup required later.
He said business has been slow, as expected, because of the shut down.
“We’re trying to get the word out that we are back open,” he said. The restaurant reopened Sept. 15. “Once business is back we will bring our people back. (Some employees) are on call now.”
Middletown Mayor Sebastian Guiliano said the property, which is owned by the city and leased to the Mattabesett Canoe Club, has had a long history of flooding. But the problem was made worse when the previous owner decided to enclose the bottom floor. It had been an open patio where canoes were stored when it was a true canoe club.
Guiliano said future renovations to the property might call for opening up that ground floor again.
“In warm weather, you could have tables down there which would be shaded,” he said. “You wouldn’t want anything down there that you couldn’t move.”
Guiliano said the riverfront area near the Canoe Club is an underutilized resource, with the restaurant, the boat houses and a park the only sections that have any public use. While little can be done to prevent the flooding for the restaurant, Guiliano said possible future redevelopment nearby could give a boost to the business.
“When the city joins the Mattabesett Sewer District, we would decommission the wastewater plant and then you would open up the riverfront cove area that extends to the south of where the restaurant is, and that becomes part of a larger use,” he said.
Cronin, who has worked to spruce up the restaurant’s menu and create a more family-friendly atmosphere, said he’ll continue to get the word out that the Mattabesett Canoe Club is back up and running.
“We didn’t lose everything,” he said. “We are going to stay open throughout the year, and we’ll try to keep that customer base through newspapers, advertising, charity fundraisers and word of mouth.”
