After Tornado, 2 Towns Team Up To OK Housing For Homeless Family

BRANFORD-NORTH BRANFORD, CT — It isn't clear how attached Peyton Moriarty was to the black, white and pink Holstein stuffed cow he won at the Durham Fair — and which now sits high atop a dumpster in his front yard packed with his family’s ruined belongings. His mother, Becky, hasn’t been able to quite process the loss yet.

"It was Peyton's from the Durham Fair," Becky said. "We had to throw out anything that was not solid and could not be washed from upstairs, and basically everything from the wet moldy basement. I really just can't process this yet."

The homestead at 26 DeForest Drive, on the border of Branford and North Branford, looks like one might find after a tornado: littered with tree limbs and brush debris, and with deep ruts from the violence of the thrown trees — which were massive, if the stumps left behind are a clue. And everything that was once stored neatly outdoors is now wrecked, bent and thrown. The living room at the back of the house, where a hulking 75-foot tree came crashing through, left a frightening tableau.

Becky Moriarty was sitting with her wheelchair-bound daughter Christy, 13, in that room on the afternoon of Aug. 27 when a violent storm blew and spawned a tornado and plunged the towns into darkness for days.

Becky pulled her daughter into a hallway and covered both of them with a mattress. Then the tree came crashing in. They were not physically hurt.

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Since then, the Moriarty family —Becky, Christy, dad Kevin, and sons Keegan and Peyton — have been homeless, as the house they lived in was all but destroyed. But the hardest of all to cope with has been living without the accessibility accommodations Christy, a freshman at Branford High School, needs.

That’s where the efforts of many folks in two towns, and a handicap-accessible trailer, have come in.

Finding a place to rent with the accessibility features was next to impossible. For almost the past month, the family had been staying with Becky’s father at his Short Beach home. But the house has “stairs all over,” and Christy must be carried up and down them. The house they called home had all the accessibility accommodations: a handicapped bathroom with roll-in shower and sink set lower for her to use from her chair.

The family’s insurance company had a solution: a handicap-accessible mobile home on the site while next steps are worked out: rebuild or raze.

But anyone who has ever dealt with a planning and zoning office knows that getting permits for building-related plans is a process. And in the case of the Moriarty family’s home, it was an even bigger challenge: The property is located in two towns: Branford and North Branford. That meant dealing with zoning and building officials in the two towns — and during a pandemic.
A reporter who has covered planning and zoning matters for years reached out to both departments and, over the course of just a few days, observed a collaboration among planning, building and zoning officials and staff in close-but-separate towns to make it happen.

After going over permit applications submitted by the company that builds the handicap-accessible mobile home — American Mobile Homes based in Weymouth, Massachusetts — North Branford zoning officer Tom Hogarty told Patch, “From my little world, it’s good to go.” In Branford, his zoning counterpart, Daniel Brennan, also was on the job. Within just a couple of days, the complicated procedural signoffs had been done by Hogarty, Brennan, Branford building official Anthony Cinicola and North Branford building official Thomas Cowell.

On Tuesday, almost three weeks after the storm, the trailer was delivered. It would take a few more days to hook it up to utilities and get an occupancy approval. By Friday morning, the family was still waiting on getting electricity, an even more complicated process that involved United Illuminating and electrical inspectors. State Rep. Robin Comey is helping on that front. Still, the hope is that the family will not have to wait another weekend to move in.

“We’re so thankful to the towns for working together to get us moving towards a long-term but temporary solution,” said Becky, a Branford native. “We’re looking forward to being back in the neighborhood we love and where we’ve spent the last 15 years.”

Meanwhile, the GoFundMe page created for the family is still up, but as donations have slowed to a crawl, the family is still struggling.

“We are thankful for every donation," said the Branford High School graduate. "We pray it will be enough. But our faith is strong. We are surrounded by family, church and friends.”