New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The science and power behind ice storms
Last week, while much of the state got rained on, I got iced.
I live on the northeast edge of Litchfield County. In my town, and the towns nearby, it was cold enough at ground level that the rain froze when it fell on tree limbs, railings and clotheslines. The birches in my yard were suitably bent.
A lot of this had to do with elevation and cold pockets of air — when I drove east, downhill, the ice was a no-show.
Nor did the rain — which forecasters first thought might glaze larger parts of Fairfield and Litchfield counties — freeze much of anything there.
“We measured .08 inches of ice,’’ said Gary Lessor, director of The Weather Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. “We knew by Saturday it would be less than a tenth.’’
Matt Spies, of Brookfield — state coordinator of CoCoRHAS, the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network, which uses a corps of volunteers to collect precipitation data — said by the time he checked his gauges, the little ice that might have been was washed away.
“I got a half-inch of rain,’’ Spies said
This is one of the problems of ice storms — they can weigh heavily in some towns, and lighten up a few miles away. They’re largely unstudied and hard to calibrate. Rain falls into gauges, snow gathers on the ground. But how do you measure ice — radially, on the branch of a tree, or horizontally, on top of a flat surface?
But when the temperatures and storm patterns line up correctly, they have the potential to do serious damage to the environment, as well as make human lives miserable. The events of last week showed that, with icing shutting down a good part of the Southwest U.S.
Because that storm caused minimal problems here, we could dismiss it as something happening in Texas. But the rain and ice we got was part of the same system that proved a killer down south.
“These are massive winter storms,’’ said Bill Jacquemin, senior meteorologist at the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury.
Ice storms happen when a layer of warm air flows into a column of cold winter air, while a narrow layer of freezing-temperature air gets trapped at the earth’s surface. If snow falls, the warm air melts it into rain. When it hits the earth, it freezes on contact.
Jacquemin said a hard, steady rain doesn’t convert into an ice storm, because the rain washes away the ice as it forms. What’s needed is sustained drizzle and mist. Then, the ice accumulates.
When that happens, the weight of the ice downs tree limbs. Those falling branches, in turn, take down power lines and make travel treacherous.
“Even if there’s a blizzard, people think they can drive, if they give themselves more time,’’ Lessor of Western’s Weather Center said. “People are afraid of ice.’’
New England generally gets a moderate ice storm every five to 10 years and a severe one every 35 to 85 years.
In 1898, a severe ice storm shut down the state’s Northwest Connecticut, with witnesses saying the sound of tree limbs cracking reminded them of July 4 fireworks.
On Dec. 16, 1973, another severe ice storm caused a third of the state to lose power. That storm caused more damage to Connecticut’s trees than the Great 1938 Hurricane.
There has been recent work to study ice storms and how they work.
In the winters of 2015-16 and 2016-17, researchers at the 7,800-acre Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire’s White Mountains created the first man-made ice storms, using fire hoses to spray trees with water on freezing nights.
What the research team found was that at a quarter-inch of ice or less, trees suffered minimal damage. At a half-inch or more, the branches started falling.
The team estimated that a heavy ice storm could bring down a year’s worth of woody debris in one night. The trees also suffered wounds that did not heal readily. Where icing was heaviest, the damage opened the forest canopy, letting more light onto the forest floor.
Lindsey Rustad, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, who led the ice storm research at Hubbard Brook said that with climate change making extreme weather events more frequent, it’s important to better understand how ice storms work.
“They happen from Texas to New England to Oregon’’ she said. “They happen all over the world.’’
For all the constraints that COVID-19 has laid on people of faith, houses of worship across southwest Connecticut are undergoing an awakening that is changing how congregations connect with each other and expanding how they reach out to neighbors.
“This has been a great exercise in looking past our own faith community to come together to meet the needs of the people of our city,” said the Rev. Carl McCluster, the longtime pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Bridgeport. “People don’t need ceremony – they need the love of God itself, and maybe we’re being forced now to make good on that.”
The spiritual leader of a Stamford synagogue agrees that the urgency of the COVID emergency has given his congregation a renewed appreciation for “the fragility of life and being more active in preserving it.”
“It has been a transformational year,” said Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, where bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals are now streaming online along with weekly services. “We have always prided ourselves as being a congregation without walls, and this year we have had to prove it.”
Clergy and lay leaders in Hamden, Norwalk, Greenwich and Danbury tell similar stories about how the coronavirus crisis has “leveled the playing field” and inspired their congregations to do more to help the hungry, the homeless and the poor.
The stories of innovation and inspiration are so prevalent, in fact, that a leading researcher in Hartford believes they amount to more than a collection of pandemic anecdotes, but a seminal moment in American history.
Researcher Scott Thumma, who is embarking on a national multimillion-dollar study about the subject, believes something is happening at the “deep interpersonal and spiritual level” that “may signal a new reality for American congregational life.”
“The tremendous amount of change that congregations have put into effect in an incredibly short amount of time is frankly shocking to me,” said Thumma, a professor of Sociology of Religion at Hartford Seminary, and the director of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. “It’s taken a crisis for congregations to risk making these sacrifices.”
Thumma has just been awarded a $300,000 planning grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to design a five-year study that explores
the “changing patterns of engagement and attitudes about religious life,” and “what will happen to these entities once the virus is a distant memory.”
The spiritual leader of a Hamden mosque said he’s encouraging members of his community to use their extended time at home while the mosque is closed to get closer to God in prayer and study, and to cherish their time alone with their families.
In doing so, they’ll be better Muslims than those who are forever at the mosque, Imam Saladin Hasan said.
“We try to encourage everybody to bring themselves as close to God as they can bring themselves as individuals,” said Hasan, the spiritual leader of the Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan Islamic Center in Hamden, where services, meetings and religious classes are held online. “Then when God open these doors, we will come together better.”
The pastor of a Catholic Church in Norwalk says he has already seen a remarkable transformation in his parish, despite the grief of losing loved ones to COVID, and the restrictions on faceto-face gatherings.
“It’s really been an amazing experience – we’ve seen the real power of the community coming together to take up collections of food and clothing and money for the poor,” said the Rev. Rojin Karickal, pastor of St. Jerome Church in Norwalk. “As the pastor I find that very powerful.”
Thumma’s study, Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations: Innovation Amidst and Beyond COVID-19, comes as the oneyear anniversary of the pandemic approaches in March, and at a time when the subject is getting more attention on the national
stage.
Late last month, for example, a study by Pew Research Center found Americans were more likely than people from other countries to say the pandemic has strengthened their religious faith.
In Danbury, the president of the Association of Religious Communities said that despite COVID’s restrictions, the crisis has “brought congregations together.”
“The generosity of these communities both with financial donations and the donations of food has just been out of this world,” said Joe Walkovich, president of ARC and a parishioner at St. James Episcopal Church in downtown Danbury. “I would never have believed in a pandemic that you would get that kind of a response.”
Building closed, church open
It’s too soon to say whether the spirit of innovation that has seen houses of worship utilize Zoom and Facebook will endure beyond the pandemic. It is also not clear whether faith communities that have become more comfortable identifying church outside the walls of the worship building will revert to traditional ways of relating to the world once vaccines make group gatherings safe, the scholar Summa said.
One thing is clear: no one will be shy about returning to their home churches once it’s safe, said Sam Deibler of the First United Methodist Church of Greenwich.
“One of the things we Methodists like to do is get in small groups for fellowship and frankly, to have something to eat,” said Deibler, a co-lay leader of the parish. “Even though we are doing Zoom meetings, there is an element of fellowship that is missing which is an important part of our lives.”
The pastor of a small church in Bridgeport agrees.
“It is really challenging because we want to be inclusive and invite people who can Zoom to do so, but not everybody has a computer,” said the Rev. Lisa Eleck, pastor of Olivet Congregational Church.
The solution at Olivet is to keep looking for creative ways to keep people engaged while the church is closed – such as mailing the readings for the Sunday service to parishioners, so they can join the Zoom call by phone and follow along.
“The building is closed but the church is open, because the people are the church, not the building,” Eleck said. “You have to maintain that connection with whatever adaptation you can.”
WASHINGTON — Add Mother Nature to the pile of crises on President Joe Biden’s plate.
A month into the job and focused on the coronavirus, Biden is seeing his disaster management skills tested after winter storms plunged Texas, Oklahoma and neighboring states into an unusual deep freeze that left millions shivering in homes that lost heat and power, and in many homes, water.
At least 69 deaths across the U.S. have been blamed on the blast of unseasonable weather.
The White House announced on Saturday that the president had declared a major disaster in Texas, and he has asked federal agencies to identify additional resources to address the suffering.
Biden came into office Jan. 20 promising to tackle a series of brewing crises, starting with the coronavirus pandemic and its ripple effects on the economy. He tacked on systemic racism and climate change as top priorities. And now he’s contending with storms that have not only imperiled Americans but also delayed the shipment and administration of millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines.
Biden said Friday that he hopes to travel to Texas next week but doesn’t want his presence and the accompanying presidential entourage to distract from the recovery.
“They’re working like the devil to take care of their folks,” Biden said of Texas officials. He said he’d make a decision early next week about travel.
Biden, who offered himself during the campaign as the experienced and empathetic candidate the nation needed at this moment in time, is working on several fronts to address the situation — and to avoid repeating the mistakes of predecessors who got tripped up by inadequate or insensitive responses in times of disaster.
Part of the job of being president is responding to the destruction left behind by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters, or events like deadly mass shootings, or even acts of terrorism.
Some have handled such situations better than others.
George W. Bush earned praise for his leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks but stumbled during his administration’s halting response to the humanitarian disaster that unfolded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast four years later.
Barack Obama said he should have anticipated the blowback he got for going to the golf course right after he condemned the beheading of a kidnapped American journalist by Islamist militants in 2014. Obama was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard at the time.
Donald Trump was criticized for tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd of people in Puerto Rico who had endured Hurricane Maria’s pummeling of the island in 2017. He defended tossing the towels, saying the people were “having fun.”
Bill Clinton, who famously claimed during the 1992 presidential campaign that “I feel your pain,” was a natural at connecting with disaster victims.
Just this week, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas showed how quickly one bad move during a crisis can become a public relations disaster for a politician.
Cruz came under attack for traveling to Mexico while his constituents suffered without power, heat and running water. His explanation — that his daughters pushed for the getaway
because they were out of school — was particularly planned. Cruz later said the trip was a mistake.
Biden has tweeted about Texas and the other affected states, while the White House has issued numerous statements aimed at demonstrating that the federal government is in command of the situation. The president is getting regular updates from his staff and already declared states of emergency in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana — adding the disaster designation announced Saturday for Texas.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has shipped dozens of generators and supplies, including fuel, water, blankets and ready-toeat meals, to the affected areas.
Biden has spoken to the governors of the seven states most affected by the winter weather. He tweeted a photo of himself on the phone with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.
Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, a staunch supporter of Trump’s, was quick to praise Biden for swift action on a disaster declaration.
After speaking with Biden by telephone earlier this week, Stitt specifically thanked the president for “taking the time to reach out this afternoon and
offer the federal government’s help for Oklahomans. We had a very productive call and I look forward to working together to find solutions as we recover from this historic storm.”
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Biden is “wellsuited“to deal with the disaster because of his decades of service in the U.S. Senate and as a former vice president and because of “his genuine concern for people.”
“He’s got to show empathy right off the bat,” Perry said in an interview. “It’s important for a president to go to a place that’s been battered, but be careful about the footprint. He doesn’t want to make things worse.”
Biden, should he decide to visit Texas next week, could also use the trip to press his point that climate change is real and must not go unaddressed, and that the state could do things like winterize its power plants to be better prepared for future storms, Perry said.
But he should take care to not do so in a scolding kind of way.
“We know he cares about climate change, and this is a way to convince people,” Perry said.