On Sunday night as the rain continued to pour down, the tiny culvert through which the South Branch Bullet Hill Brook escapes became clogged with debris, and that ridgeline acted like a dam, water piling up on the far side.
That accidental dam broke just past 1 a.m.
"First it sounded like wind, but then you could hear water and everything crashing. I didn't know what was going on," said Cathy Dibner. "My son and my daughter came running upstairs. Downstairs, the house was rumbling. We came out here, my son had a flashlight shined towards the barn and it wasn't there, and all you see is just water."
They weren't alone. The numbers are still unclear, but many who live in the rural southwest corner of the state suffered serious property damage resulting from a raging flash flood that tore through the area. Two women were killed in the disaster and harrowing rescues were common for emergency responders over the weekend.
Cathy's husband Eric Dibner grew up on the property, moving there as a baby in his mother's arms. Over the years he built, with his own hands and those of his friends, a covered pavilion where the family would barbecue, and an aluminum barn for his wife's chickens.
It's all gone now, washed away in pieces or covered with muck. The Larkin trail above the property is now bisected by a great gash in the hillside, the mud and dirt spread across the entirety of the Dibners' land. The pavilion is in pieces. The in-ground pool is not visible at all.
Though the rushing water came close to their home, Eric Dibner insists that it wasn't so much of a flood as it was a mudslide or an earthen glacier. The force of the water tore trees out by their roots, changed the very landscape, and altered the course of the brook.
The barn where Cathy Dibner kept her flock of 100 or so chickens was ripped apart. The remains, along with the chicken cages, a boat, a snowmobile and several large, metal shipping containers, can be found at the far end of the property, mangled and wrapped around trees.
"Look all the way up there," Cathy Dibner said on Wednesday, gesturing toward her home, a distance of several hundred feet from the edge of the devastation. "That's how wide this thing came through and wiped out everything."
The flood waters continued beyond the Dibners' land, carrying brush and logs and mud and silt about two full miles as the crow flies, all the way to the center of Southbury, where days later crews were working to make roads passable.
Cathy's chickens
About 10 years ago, Cathy Dibner had open heart surgery.
"I had a lot of time on my hands, and I started seeing everybody with chickens everywhere in Agway," she said. "So, I went to Agway and started off with 12 chickens and 10 ducks."
Pretty soon, those few chickens became a few more, and a few more. It's a phenomenon Cathy Dibner calls "chicken math."
"You start off with four chickens and end up with 400 because you want all the different breeds," she said. "You want all the different color eggs. Chickens become addicting."
That's how Cathy's House of Chickens was born.
"I was home recovering, and I said, 'Hey, I'm going to start incubating some eggs, and so I started buying hatching eggs from local farmers trying to hatch," she said. "The first couple times, it was a complete failure, and then I started getting the hang of it, and then it starts becoming addicting, and chicken math sets in and, before you know it, the whole side of the yard was filled with coops and different breeds."
They started with dog kennels, but Cathy Dibner asked her husband to build a barn, which was soon filled to capacity with breeds like lavender orpington, cream legbar, zombie, cemani and sapphire chickens.
"My main thing was providing backyard chickens to the community, also to New York, Massachusetts," Cathy Dibner said. "I'd have people drive here from all over to pick up chickens. I had people taking the ferry from Long Island coming here."
What started out as a hobby became physically curative.
"It's very therapeutic. The chickens are therapeutic for me. They always have been," she said.
Now after the storm, all the chickens are gone, washed away or buried, their cages bent and twisted. She's found two corpses, and isn't sure she wants to find more.
"They were mangled in the trees," she said. "I don't want to look."
Dibner said that for her, they were more than just birds.
"I feel like I lost my kids. I treat my animals like my children," she said. "That's the last time I will ever see them again."
Waiting for FEMA
The Dibners' insurance, like that of most homeowners, does not cover flood damage from events like Sunday's storm, and some of it will be the state's responsibility.
Workers will have to make sure the gas line that runs under the property is secure, and possibly rebuild the Larkin trail so the South Branch Bullet Hill Brook can be redirected back to its old course.
"They need to redirect it because there's water, there's rivers everywhere now that were never here," Cathy Dibner said. "In people's backyards, there's a river flowing" that was never there before.
They think the damage to their property will run into the millions. They've filed a claim with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and are hoping federal or state money will help them rebuild what was lost and destroyed.
On Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Connecticut's Aug. 18 flood, clearing the way for FEMA to provide assistance to those affected.
The devastation is clearly beyond the Dibners' ability to manage. "How do you even begin to clean this up? I wish I had an answer," Cathy Dibner said.
They have probably waterlogged motorcycles still locked away in disfigured, crumpled shipping containers, an upturned boat stuck amid the trees, huge rocks and logs strewn about the backyard. Cathy Dibner joked that her property looks like a scene from the movie, "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome."
"I'm Tina," she laughed, referring to Tina Turner's role as Auntie Entity in the 1985 apocalyptic thriller.
But the Dibners remain hopeful and grateful. A GoFundMe set up by friends had collected almost $14,000 to rebuild Cathy's House of Chickens, and none of the family was hurt. One son is getting ready to join the U.S. Navy soon. The couple's 9-year-old happened to be out of state with other family members, and though the water threatened their home, it never quite reached it.
"My kids are alive, and I'm alive, he's alive," Cathy Dibner said. She believes their now unrecognizable pavilion, where they watched movies on summer nights and enjoyed barbecue dinners, helped keep the mud from destroying their home.
"If it wasn't for this pavilion catching this mud, I wouldn't be here talking to you today," she said.
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