Nearly 10 Months After Irene, One Family Still Isn't Home

One Wayne family is still recovering from Hurricane Irene.

Manuel and Maria Pineiro have not returned to their home since Aug. 27 of last year after their Boulavard Drive home was flooded.

“I just want my house back or to at least have someone buy it,” Maria Pineiro said.

The couple immigrated to the United States from Spain in 1977. They bought their house immediately after the historic flood in 1984. The house is located in the Old Wayne section of town only a few hundred feet from the Pompton River.

Despite the neighborhood having a history of flooding, their home only received water in it once, in 2010. The couple has paid for flood insurance that entire time.

The Pineiros have been living with their daughter Maria and son-in-law Brian Taylor two blocks away from their house for months now.

The couple only received a $61,000 settlement from Selective Insurance, a fraction of what they claim is needed to repair their house.

“We’re not looking for much, we just want the house to be fixed safely so they can get back into it,” Taylor said.

Selective indicated in a letter to the Pineiros that large cracks in the house’s foundation and sloping floors inside the house existed before the flood and, as a result, won’t pay to have them repaired.

“The subject building was not structurally damaged by hydrodynamic forces, hydrostatic forces, scour or erosion of the supporting soils, or buoyancy forces of the floodwaters associated with the flood event,” a letter from Selective to the couple states.

The damaged sloping floors were, according to the letter, “the result of long-term differential movement of the building” and were “unrelated to the floodwaters.”

The interior of the house is almost completely gutted.

A representative or spokesperson from Selective could not be reached for comment.

“People shouldn’t be treated like this,” Taylor said. “This is what you get for working for 30 years in this country? I just don’t see it.”

The Pineiros are not the only Wayne family to suffer long-term consequences from Irene, a storm that caused the worst flooding the area they’ve ever seen.

Loyla Louvis and her family from their house for four months. Denise Zeigler, her husband, and their young sons couldn’t live in their Fairfield Road for months after Irene.  It was the fifth time their home in six years.

The Pineiros wish they were one of the dozens of Wayne residents to have their home , but they don’t qualify for the program.

A new long-term recovery group is working with local families like the Pineiros to fix their homes and fill out the proper paperwork to get assistance. The group several meetings this month. Councilwoman Lonni Miller Ryan a few months ago.

“There’s still a lot of people out there who are stuck who need help,” Ryan said recently. “We want to do anything we can to help them.”

The Pineiros said that the whole experience has changed the way they feel about the United States.

“Now, nobody seems to care about us,” Pineiro said. “That just seems to be the way America is now and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

— Have a question or news tip? Contact editor Daniel Hubbard at Daniel.Hubbard@patch.com or find us on Facebook and Twitter. For news straight to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter.