A river that kept coming back for the valley

The river rose over mills built to use it

Water came down the Naugatuck River in August 1955 faster than any town on its banks had built for. Two hurricanes hit one after the other. The river rose over factory floors, rail lines, and Main Streets that had stood for a century. Naugatuck sits low against the river. It lies in a valley carved from ancient bedrock. State geologists call this bedrock the Waterbury Gneiss. That low ground is exactly what the water wanted back. Mills had chosen these banks in the first place because the river turned their wheels. In 1955, it turned on them.

The damage ran the length of the valley, not just through one town. Bridges washed out. Whole blocks of industrial buildings went under. These buildings had been built right next to the water because the water was the point. People in Naugatuck and the towns above and below it spent weeks after the flood pulling mud out of buildings. These buildings had never been built to survive a river moving that fast.

Planners studied the whole valley, not one town

The answer came from planners, not from any one town. The Connecticut Development Commission hired someone to study the whole Naugatuck Valley. The study covered the years 1955 to 1957. It worked out what the flood had done. It worked out what the region should do about it. It was not a report about one dam or one levee. It looked at every town on the river at once. It asked what "conditions and prospects" meant for a valley built almost entirely along one waterway.

The study treated the river as a regional problem. A flood that starts in the hills above Torrington does not stop for a town line. The study sat beside a parallel study of flood insurance for the same stretch of river. It sat beside older economic surveys of the same valley. All of them were written after the water had just done its damage. The rock under Naugatuck had been there since before there were towns to flood. The plans written in these years were the first real attempt to build around it instead of just building over it again.

Eight people in Naugatuck did not survive the water

Eight people in Naugatuck did not survive the water. The river climbed 27 feet that day, part of a flood that killed 87 people across Connecticut. It swept through mill housing and factory floors before anyone could get clear. The Great Flood of 1955 was a regional planning problem to the people who studied it later. To the families in town it was a death count first.

Fire destroyed a factory's stock and machinery on Church Street

Sixty-two years before the flood, fire had already shown the valley what it stood to lose. The J. M. Page & Co. Factory Fire on Church Street burned through its stock and machinery in a blaze people at the time called the worst in Naugatuck's history. The mills here ran on wood floors, oiled machinery, and packed storerooms. All of it was fuel. The town rebuilt after that fire the same way it would rebuild after the flood decades later, one more time betting the same ground would hold.

A woman died in a fire on the same low ground

An 86-year-old woman died in a fire at the Oak Terrace apartments on Conrad Street. Crews got the call around 2:40 in the morning and found her with serious burns. The building sits in the same low ground the mill towns were built on, on the same river system the planners spent 1955 to 1957 trying to tame. The flood control and the zoning changed. People still live close to the water, and the water still finds a way to take one of them.