Stunning video captured the moment a home was ripped from its foundation and thrown into a river as a historic and deadly storm ravaged Connecticut.
The dilapidated two-story home crumbled into pieces when the remaining shards of its foundation gave way on Monday after hours of torrential rain and flooding.
Tables and chairs can be seen falling out of the torn-apart building just before the roof slides down the embankment below and falls onto the rocky bank of a once-babbling stream that swelled to a massive flood during the weekend storm.
Fortunately, homeowner Randi Marcucio and her three-year-old son were able to escape the building before chaos broke out.
“You just fall to the ground. Everything goes away,” Marcucio said in an emotional telephone interview with the Post on Tuesday.
Marcucio, a single mother and emergency room nurse, had lived in the Oxford home for just two and a half years. She bought the house on Mother’s Day 2022 after finding the narrow Fivemile Brook, which flows along the property, an idyllic place to raise a young boy.
The same creek was flooding when the storm that killed at least two people passed through Sunday afternoon while Marcucio was cooking dinner.
The flooding was so severe that the street turned into a river, washing away parts of the mound of earth on which Marcucio’s house stood.
“The river started to carry away the massive, tall, tall deck piers,” Marcucio recalls.
“The deck started to crumble. The deck broke. The oil tank came off the house. Slowly but surely over the course of hours, everything started to crumble. The basement started to crumble. The basement broke. A lot of the basement broke. And then the second story was just kind of hanging in the air.”
The house finally collapsed around 9 a.m. on Monday, but Marcucio was unable to witness the tragedy – she spent the storm helping other neighbors find shelter on the flooded hill. After spending hours making sure the neighborhood’s babies were safe, the emergency room nurse slept in her parents’ house.
A neighbor heard the cracking and ran to investigate. When Marcucio returned, all that was left was the remains of her house.
To make matters worse, Marcucio said she couldn’t recoup her losses – she didn’t have flood insurance, so the damage wouldn’t be covered.
Despite the horror, the single mother tries to stay positive, a difficult task that is made possible above all by the overwhelming love of her son.
“He’s amazing. He’s such a smart, happy kid and he knows something is wrong, but he’s happy to see his mommy,” Marcucio said.
“He doesn’t even really know what’s going on. He just knows that people keep coming to him… He’s seen me in different houses, he’s seen me soaking wet. He saw me crying the last day, so he’s glad mom is there, and now he can show mom the things his ‘friends’ – strangers – have come to him with,” she continued, referring to donations sent by neighbors and money raised through an online fundraiser.
“Oh my God. It’s unbelievable. One breath you want to die, and the next you think, ‘This is it. This is life,'” Marcuico said.
“I didn’t lose my life. My son didn’t lose his life. We lost our things. Two women lost their lives. How can I even begin to complain about anything?” she continued.
Marcucio’s house was not the only building damaged in the flooding that hit western Connecticut on Sunday into Monday. Search and rescue teams had to evacuate more than 100 people.
About five miles north of Marcucio’s property, two women were killed; one of them was swept away as she walked along the road.
