By STEPHEN BEALE
 

GOFFSTOWN - For Jennifer Eaton, it was too good to be true.

At age 19, she and her boyfriend had been approved for a mortgage, allowing them to buy a three-room house with an unobstructed view of the meandering Piscataquog River close by. One night, a few weeks later, she sat by the river, wondering how she had been so lucky.

“I said, ‘What did I do to deserve a good house at this age? Something’s going to happen,” Eaton said.

Eaton and her boyfriend moved into the 5 Sonny Ave. home in September 2005, having never owned anything before, let alone rent a place. “I don’t know how we got this house,” Eaton said. The couple saw their house as a good investment, planning to fix it up and sell it for a profit.

But the following May they had broken up and the river that had drawn them to the neighborhood drove them away in a disastrous flood.

Insurance gave them $30,000 to remodel their home, but Eaton and her ex-boyfriend, whom she said had stopped paying his share of the mortgage, could not agree on how to spend it. So the two finally handed the check over to the bank, to offset their mortgage.

Jennifer Eaton, 21, stands inside the gutted Goffstown
home that was destroyed by the flooding in 2006.
She was hoping recently-denied FEMA buyout money
would help go toward the remaining mortgage.
(Stephen Beale photo.)

Eaton never returned to the home, which has stood gutted and abandoned. Yet she can’t quite get the home and the past it represents out of her life. “There is like a ball and chain on my foot,” Eaton said. “There is this only thing and I can’t get away. Everything else is going great.”

Eaton, now 21, has gone from being a nursing assistant at the Catholic Medical Center to working as a health and insurance associate at Fidelity Investments. In a few years, she wants to move out of her Manchester apartment and settle down in a new home.

But she is saddled with the remaining $95,000 on her mortgage, the lingering threat of foreclosure and the personal debt she racked up after the flood.

News last fall that the town would be applying for buyouts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, offered her a way out.

“Now here we are two years later, waiting for this buyout,” Eaton said.

Some of her neighbors could not wait that long. Rhonda Scheerders, who lives next door at 3 Sonny Ave., said it was too late for the buyout. Her family, unlike Eaton, paid to have the house renovated and elevated above flood levels.

They now have $250,000 in loans to pay off. They would still be responsible for those loans in a buyout, which would purchase the house, but not forgive any debt, mortgages, liens or other related debt.

“I wouldn’t take a buyout now because what could it do?” Scheerders said.

Yet other neighbors who had invested a lot in recovering from the two 100-year floods in 2006 and 2007 said they want to leave the area to avoid the personal heartache and financial headache of dealing with future floods.

Nancy Congdon, at 9 Sonny Ave., like Scheerders, raised her house one floor and spent large sums of money fixing it up and handling other flood-related issues on her property. She estimates that the 2006 flood alone cost her $100,000. But her debt did not stop her from thinking about the buyout.

Congdon and Eaton were among two dozen homeowners who signed up through the town for the FEMA program, in which the government would have purchased her home for its fair market value before the flood and razed it to the ground.

The town application, however, was denied last month.

“It was my last hope and now it’s like, ‘What are we going to do?’” Eaton said. “What can we do? I’m sick of it.”

Jim Bingham, the assistant town administrator, has said that there may be a chance for the town to reapply for the buyouts.

As a first step toward starting over, he said the Board of Selectmen will be holding a meeting with the state FEMA coordinator and affected residents. The date has not been set.

Mark Payne, another applicant, said many other flood victims were interested in the buyouts but missed the deadline.

Payne, who wants to move, said that, for now, he will stay at his 21 Russell Ave. home. “It is what it is,” Payne said.
 

Reproduced by the Goffstown Residents Association.