One-time political rivals now on same team to revive ‘American dream’ destroyed in CT flood ‘of Biblical magnitude’

The Klarides sisters never give up.

In politics and in life, Themis and Nicole Klarides have carried on the family tradition as the daughters of proud immigrants who trace back more than 100 years to their grandfather who came to the United States from Greece in search of the American Dream and operated two supermarkets in the Naugatuck Valley.

The sisters are now facing their greatest challenge as they vow to rebuild the heavily damaged Klarides Village shopping plaza in Seymour in which 15 stores were flooded and knocked out of business by a raging storm Aug. 18 that dumped as much as 16 inches of rain in mere hours on Oxford and surrounding towns. In the worst cases, a liquor store, nail salon, coin shop, UPS store, Hallmark Cards, and the Route 67 Family Diner in the shopping plaza were completely flooded.

Several shops had at least 6 feet of water inside, and the package store had an estimated $500,000 to $750,000 worth of liquor bottles that were either floating, smashed or covered with thick mud. Its owners wore white hazmat suits during the extensive clean up. The water went as high as the roof at the liquor store following the storm that caused as much as $100 million in overall damages for roads and businesses in Oxford, Southbury, and Seymour.

Former state House Republican leader Themis Klarides and state Rep. Nicole Klarides-Ditria of Seymour oversee the shopping plaza as two of the five owners, along with three of their female cousins, in a female-owned business that is recovering from a 1,000-year flood.

Their father, Peter, and his two brothers built the complex through decades of sweat and hard work.

“My dad passed away in 2020, and I am thankful that he wasn’t here to see this because it would have killed him,” Klarides-Ditria said in an interview. “It just absolutely would have killed him. He and his brothers — all their hard work that they did building this plaza and passed it on to their kids. It’s just heartbreaking. But we’ll rebuild it. Klarideses don’t give up. It’s not in our DNA.”

The sisters have spent part of their adult lives in politics helping constituents, and now they and their tenants are seeking government assistance through state and federal agencies like the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA. They realize that receiving reimbursements from a government bureaucracy takes time, but they are working constantly to get the stores reopened.

The sisters have deep experience in dealing with the government because they worked, according to the Connecticut State Library, as the first two sisters to serve simultaneously in the state legislature in Connecticut history.

While some have told them they might be overly optimistic, they are hoping to get all of the stores reopened by Christmas.

“Themis and I always say, and this started from my dad and my uncles, this is a family business, but all the business owners, all these tenants are all extended Klarides family,” Klarides-Ditria told The Courant. “That’s the way our dad and his brothers treated them, and that’s the way we treat them. We were crying with them, just as much as everybody. We want them to come back as fast as possible because this is their livelihood.”

She added, “This is the true definition of small business. What my dad and his brothers did is the American Dream. Everybody’s blood, sweat, and tears is in this plaza. Not just my family, but all these individual families.”

Top state and local officials visited the plaza last week as Gov. Ned Lamont announced that the state would quickly provide grants up to $25,000 for as many as 200 small businesses that were damaged in Seymour, Oxford, Southbury, and beyond. The atmosphere at the plaza at times was like a funeral, but it turned to hope as the shop owners stepped up to the microphone at a news conference and vowed to rebuild.

While the individual store owners said they did not have flood insurance, the Klarides sisters are trying to help.

“We, as plaza owners, have flood insurance on each of those individual buildings, and we have regular property insurance,” Klarides-Ditria said. “Thank God we always had flood insurance on these buildings, so we’re going to do what we can to help the tenants with that money. That all comes from our dad and his brothers because they were always planners, and the Klarideses always plan for the worst. It’s something my dad taught me.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat Themis Klarides challenged in 2022 before she lost a Republican primary, has visited the site twice and maintains direct contact with the sisters.

“They have literally texted me every single day — sometimes twice a day — not for themselves, but for the business owners who are literally going through such heartbreak and suffering,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal and others acknowledged that obtaining government funding can sometimes be painstakingly slow, but President Joe Biden signed the initial disaster declaration in less than 24 hours. Now, residents and businesses need to document the damages before reimbursements can be made.

“We’re here because we want more than words. We want action,” Blumenthal said at the plaza. “Everybody here is hungry for action, not just rhetoric and speech-making.”

Multiple officials said that pictures could not fully capture the magnitude of the damage or convey the speed of the water as it crashed into the businesses and wiped out roads nearby.

“If anybody is out there, wondering why we are here — this flood was of Biblical magnitude,” Blumenthal said. “Literally the amount of water that fell on Southbury alone was the volume of Lake Zoar [in Southbury]. Think of it for a moment. In six hours, the amount of water on just one town was the volume of Lake Zoar. That’s what the first selectman told me. There is a lot of work to be done on the roads, bridges, culverts, dams, small businesses and homes.”

Residents were flabbergasted that the damage came from Little River, is a tiny brook that is normally only 10 feet wide and 1 foot deep. With the torrential rains, the brook quickly swelled to 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep. That allowed the water to reach the roof of Woodland Wine and Spirits, a business that has been owned by the same family for two decades.

“At Woodland Wines, the water was right up to the bottom of the roof there,” Lamont said at the plaza. “This all happened in an hour and a half, as sudden as that can be.”

The flood of August 19,1955

After visiting the plaza constantly over a span of decades, Klarides said it was stunning to see the height of the water and the extent of the damage.

“That river is one to two feet deep under normal circumstances,” Klarides said. “Our dad always used to talk about the flood of 1955. Anybody who knew my father heard that story at least twice. We saw pictures, but we always thought it was a little dramatized. That was two hurricanes back to back, four days apart [in 1955]. This was even worse than that, and that was really bad. … It happened 69 years to the day of the flood of 1955.”

As a longtime Republican legislator, Themis Klarides was a rival of Blumenthal when they faced each other briefly in the 2022 race. But they are now on the same team as they try to help the small business owners who have invested their life savings into their stores.

At the far end of the plaza, the Ocean State Job Lot, a karate studio, laundromat, and the Cast Iron Chef restaurant suffered less damage and could be reopened in about five weeks if the damaged electrical infrastructure can be restored by then. But the liquor store, nail salon, and family diner, among others, will not be back for months.

Klarides-Ditria said she is hoping for “a Christmas miracle” to get the damaged stores back in action by year’s end, which will require many hours of work.

Her sister said they are working as fast as they can.

“These are small family businesses, and they can’t wait,” Klarides said. “When there’s a Herculean task ahead of you, what you have to do is you have to break it down into steps, and you have to take it one step at a time.”

The sisters, Klarides said, will keep battling until all of the businesses have reopened.

“As you know me in the things I’ve done politically,” Klarides said, “we don’t give up, and we’re fighters.”

Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com .