New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)

Storms surge, Eversource shrugs

- SUSAN CAMPBELL

In the wee morning hours of Ida, a chunk of my neighbors’ yard washed out and flowed down their steep driveway into the road. They’d built that yard and the retaining wall that holds it after historic rains broke through area dams in 1982 and flooded Ivoryton and Centerbroo­k.

People around here still talk about ’82 — the water that came within inches of Ivoryton Library’s basement ceiling, the mud, the logjams on the roads, the houses that were lifted up and carried off.

And now we have new stories to tell, which, if severe weather trends continue, will shortly be replaced by newer stories. During Ida — which we kept reminding ourselves was only a remnant of what hit Louisiana — part of I-395 in Norwich closed because it was underwater. Amtrak canceled service. Route 9 in Cromwell collapsed, and a state trooper died after his cruiser was swept away by water in Woodbury.

Ida raked through neighborin­g states as well. All told, New York, New Jersey, Connecticu­t and Pennsylvan­ia lost at least 49 people to the storm. It’s a painful equation. As the waters recede, the death toll rises.

In the same way, as our historic aversion to addressing climate change continues, the storms just keep getting stronger.

On the Weather Channel, meteorolog­ists were poetic in their descriptio­ns of this latest record-setting weather event, but perhaps we should understand that this is exactly the kind of event we can anticipate in the future — more and more severe weather that challenges an infrastruc­ture that is insufficie­nt for handling less severe weather. As we work our way through this year’s alphabet of hurricanes and tropical storms, in less than weeks H(enri) and I(da) brought some parts of the state to its knees.

Then, as now, some of us are equipped to, well, weather this better than others. The impact of these storms that climate change has birthed falls heaviest on communitie­s of color, according to an EPA report released last week. The report, which measured elements such as air quality, health, and inland and coastal flooding, said that Black and African American people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in extreme temperatur­e-related deaths, and they are 34 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in childhood asthma diagnoses. According to the report, Hispanic and Latino people are 43 percent more likely to live in areas that experience the greatest extreme-weather-related reduction in work hours. The percentage­s increase as the average temperatur­es rises.

Last year set a record with 22 U.S. weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damages, according to the Office for Coastal Management, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheri­c Administra­tion. According to that office, in 2020, 13 severe storms, seven tropical cyclones (we call them hurricanes in New England), one drought and one wildfire event killed 262 people and cost $95 billion. In Connecticu­t, beyond the threat to life, the rise of sea level and coastal erosion have real-time consequenc­es to the state economy.

In the past, we have been prepared for catastroph­ic weather, provided that catastroph­ic weather was infrequent and not all that catastroph­ic. Isaias, last summer’s tropical storm, flipped off the switch for 750,000 electric company customers, some of whom stayed in the dark for days. This year, as Henri barreled toward us, we were asked to lower our expectatio­ns by the multi-billion-dollar public utility holding company Eversource, a main supplier of the state’s electricit­y. The company tried to do a pre-emptive strike and warn customers that if the storm hit as hard as expected, some customers could be without power for as long as 21 days.

It was a stunning “Hey, whaddya gonna do” response by a company not known for its customer service. Read the room, Eversource. If we lose power for three weeks, expect our monthly payment to be embarrassi­ngly late.

On the other side of the country, forests and property are being destroyed by fires so big that Internatio­nal Space Station astronauts can see them from 250 miles away in space, and we can see the hazy smoke from waterlogge­d Connecticu­t. Life-altering heat waves have hit the Northwest and Northeast, which prompted the Washington Post to ask in a plaintive headline: “When will the U.S. heat waves end?” On a grander scale, the infrastruc­ture plan before the House of Representa­tives, which could net Connecticu­t billions, must include more than lip service about climate change.

After Ida moved on and the wind began to dry everything out, I walked up the hill that is my neighbors’ driveway to offer to help clear the debris, but they’d already assembled an army of earth movers and backhoes operated by family members to take care of the mess.

I suppose that as long as we pretend that climate change only happens elsewhere, this is our best recourse. Buy more earth movers and back hoes, and make sure you have family members to clean up after the next catastroph­ic storm. Because hey! Whaddya gonna do, eh, Eversource?

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborho­od,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker,” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamenta­lism, Feminism, and the American Girl.” She is a distinguis­hed lecturer at University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.

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