By Julianna D’Addona
UConn Journalism
On Dec. 4, 2022, flooding from a combined sewage overflow destroyed property, keepsakes, and appliances in the house of Hartford resident Sharon Lewis. The aftermath of the flood also destroyed her confidence in her insurance coverage.
Lewis had lived in the house at 32–34 Rutland Street most of her life and was about to move out of it, storing her belongings in moving boxes in the basement.
Then came a rainstorm on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022. Lewis told the moving company to delay the move by one day so they would not track mud in the house. According to a lawsuit Lewis later filed, it rained between 3 and 4 tenths of an inch that day.
She and her husband woke up Sunday morning to a cold and dry house. Thinking there was a problem with the heat, she asked her husband to go downstairs and push the reset button for the furnace.
Upon opening the door to the basement, Lewis’ husband discovered water had flooded up to the basement’s fourth step.
“I get up, I go downstairs, open the kitchen door and—oh, my God—water was about to come up to the kitchen. I’m freaking out because my freezer is floating. I can see sewage from all over the neighborhood floating in the water. I totally freaked out,” Lewis said in a virtual interview on March 12, 2025.
That day, the furnace was submerged and the oil tank was lifted off its legs and spilled oil into the basement, according to the lawsuit Lewis filed in 2024.
While a neighbor called the fire department, Lewis remembered just running up the street, feeling as though the phone did not work fast enough.
The fire department said it could not pump the floodwater because it was not clean.
Frantic, Lewis called Hartford city officials, who sent an inspector. According to the lawsuit, on Dec. 4, staff members from the city, MDC, and electric company (Eversource) came that day. A city inspector ordered the water and electricity turned off and told Lewis and her husband they must vacate until repairs could be made, according to the lawsuit.
Lewis said the flood destroyed everything she owned as it sat waiting to be moved out of the house. “I’m a collector, and I like antiques. I had so many antiques from slavery, from the deep South. I mean, things that I cherished my entire life. Gone. Couldn’t touch it, had to be thrown away.”
She said she lost family heirlooms, photos, the family Bible and family documents. “Everything is gone. It’s like my whole life disappeared overnight,” Lewis said.
From a hotel on Windsor Street, Lewis called her insurance company, which told her that the incident was not covered. Lewis, who had worked as an insurance underwriter for many years, said, “I was shocked, totally speechless” because insurance had covered her family’s earlier flood from an overflow.
“And it was anger, it was embarrassment, it was shame, it was—how did I let this happen? And I just hung up the phone.”
Lewis and her husband lived in the hotel at a cost of $1,000 per week for seven months. Friends set up a GoFundMe page to help cover costs, but Lewis said that made her feel ashamed. She then went to New Jersey while cleanup efforts were underway.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) sent its Emergency Response and Spill Prevention Division, which sent “a contractor to pump out and sanitize her basement,” said Graham Stevens, chief of the DEEP Bureau of Water Protection and Land Reuse.
“Typically, residents would call their Fire Department who would assist in arranging for, or conducting, such work,” Stevens said in an email.
Lewis confirmed that DEEP staffers had drained the flood waters but said that the basement flooded again the next day. She said that the MDC told her that sewage from her house had caused the new surge, but she said this was not possible. “My question for them was, well, if it’s my sewage, while I was in New Jersey, how in the hell did I cause three more feet of water and fecal matter to rise up in my basement?”
Initially, Lewis was told that 73,000 gallons of sewage flooded into her home. But she says, after the latter flooding, she believes the number was closer to 100,000 gallons.
Meanwhile, Lewis was told by the city of Hartford that the water company was supposed to turn her water off in her house. Seeing that the incident happened in December, in which temperatures are freezing, this was an urgent matter. However, upon returning back to her house weeks later, on or about Dec. 24, Lewis and her husband heard a noise.
“I said, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.’ The pipes for the bathroom are in the ceiling between the bathroom, which is upstairs, and the dining room. The dining room ceiling is on the dining room table. Water had been running in my house for almost three weeks. The house was destroyed upstairs.”
Lewis’s lawsuit claims that the MDC did not shut off water to the house despite direction from city officials.
She also said that she believes her house was the only one in her neighborhood that did not receive a new lateral, the waste pipe that connects the house to the street.
Lewis said that a staff member of the MDC told Lewis a sleeve may have been put around her pipe instead. “Why would they put a sleeve around my pipe, when my pipe was the one that started this whole thing?” Lewis asked.
The MDC said it could not comment on these events or Lewis’ story.
Lewis now lives in an apartment in Bloomfield. All her furniture is second-hand. A moving container sits outside of Lewis’s Hartford house.
“Naturally, that led to a lot of issues with me personally, with depression, because I had accumulated a lifetime of things that I wanted to save, and in a few seconds, all of it was gone, destroyed.”
Among the things destroyed was a long letter Lewis’ mother had written for her three daughters before she died. Lewis had read part of the letter at the time but “I just got too emotional so I couldn’t finish it,” she said.
Lewis has worked in environmental advocacy since way before she suffered this flood. She is the executive director of the Connecticut Coalition for Economic and Environmental Justice, which lobbied against the now-closed trash incinerator in Hartford. She received an award for her activism from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022. And she served on the state’s Connecticut Equity and Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (CEEJAC), to which she told the story of the flood at a meeting in 2023.
Stevens said her experience made an enormous impression on CEEJAC, which includes representatives from other state agencies and the EPA.
“After she shared this information, I called MDC to ensure they were aware of the issue,” Stevens said in an email. “I also shared this information with the EPA. EPA jointly regulates sewer systems with the department.”
“Over the next several weeks, Sharon Lewis’ experience resulted in significant attention from the department, EPA, and the media,” Stevens recalled. “What has resulted is an unprecedented investment in assisting the community impacted by sewer backups,” he said.
This led to the proposal by the MDC, at the Department’s direction, for the $170 million in projects to help and protect the community from sewer flooding and backups, including a grant program to reimburse residents for damage.
“This new approach is protecting the waterways and the community,” Stevens said.
Lewis said this attention by environmental regulators was uplifting.
“I was so happy,” Lewis said. “I mean, that was like the most positive and pleasant thing that could have even happened when you’re totally down and you have friends in the industry who want to do all they can to help you.”
Lewis is also part of the Water Justice Campaign, in which she helps people understand their insurance and ensure they get proper coverage. People come with their policies and Lewis verifies whether they have sewage backup coverage or not. She also helps people navigate conversations with insurance companies because she says it is so hard to understand.
“If you have inadequate coverage, when you have a claim, you’re going to have inadequate compensation,” Lewis said.
After everything she has been through, Lewis continues to be vocal about environmental advocacy. Though, it is not without struggle.
“I feel helpless. I feel that I can’t do anything because, sometimes, you can be the best advocate in the world, but when things happen to you, you don’t know what to do. I do for everybody else, but I can’t do for myself. I can’t explain why I can’t, but I’m helpless and pretty much paralyzed,” she said. “I’ve been seeing doctors for this and trying to get some help on why I just can’t get it together, but I’m totally destroyed by this. Totally destroyed.”
Lewis will continue speaking up for this problem despite all the hardship it has cost her.
“I knew exactly what I’d be doing in my retirement,” she said.
TOP IMAGE: The water level in Sharon Lewis’ basement as shown through the home’s hatchway in Hartford, Connecticut, Dec. 5, 2022. Photo courtesy of Sharon Lewis