As waters rise, Conn. plots climate strategy
Long Island Sound has been attacking Connecticut’s coastline at a rate of an inchandahalf every decade, but by 2050 it will be an additional 20 inches higher, increasing the vulnerability of properties that are currently insured for $675 billion.
Across state and local governments, the watchword “resiliency” has become a battle cry as they weigh the quality of life against the growing realization that socalled 500year storms hit the state at twice since 2011.
The multipronged goal is to reduce carbon emissions while protecting life and property at a time when President Donald J. Trump has denied the threat and withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, the agreement of goals that has support from most developed countries.
“Climate change is an existential threat,” Gov. Ned Lamont said Wednesday to about two dozen highranking state, corporate, local and nonprofit officials on the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change.
“It’s a real threat and if
they don’t understand it in the White House, we understand it here in Connecticut,” Lamont said to the group, one of two highprofile statelevel panels looking at solutions. “We understand it with our fellow governors. We’re going to take the lead here in Connecticut. We can do a lot more in conjunction with Rhode Island and Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey and we’re going to do this because where Washington stops, we’re going to take the lead and lead by example, and the rest of the country watching will be there soon to follow.”
The state’s confrontation with global climate change goes well beyond the 610 miles of shoreline and marsh that stretches from Greenwich to Stonington. Floodprone rivers far upland are also part of the equation, exacerbating the problem beyond the picturesque, often expensive beach communities abutting Long Island Sound.
Goal to reduce emissions
Katie Dykes, commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection who leads Lamont’s climate panel, said that in addition to supporting efforts to prevent flood damage and erosion, the state’s longerterm goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent by 2030, starting with a 10 percent goal for the end of 2020, compared to the emission levels of 1990.
“We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change in Connecticut, around the country and around the globe,” Dykes said, noting that since 1900, global temperatures have risen by 3 degrees Fahrenheit, and are projected to go up another five degrees by 2050, when the sea level rise along the Connecticut shore is ex
pected to be up another 20 inches.
“These changes have brought along impacts that affect our environment, our economy and our health; increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events; increased risk of flooding both inland and on the coastline; intense and extreme weather events; higher temperatures; and changing growing seasons, among others,” Dykes warned.
“There are a lot of inland waterways and a lot of issues around resiliency that are not just along the coast,” said state Rep. Cristin McCarthy Vehey, DFairfield, cochairman of the General Assembly’s group of 40 representatives and senators called the coastal caucus.
“We really need to make some tough decisions,” said Betsy Wingfield, deputy commissioner of environmental quality for the DEEP. She recalled the lingering effects of the downgradedHurricane Irene in August, 2011, which flooded large sections of Bridgeport, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which caused at least $360 million in damage, including chattered seawalls up and down the coast, and destroyed hundreds of homes in vulnerable communities such as Fairfield, Milford, Madison.
Wingfield recently told the coastal caucus lawmakers that the state luckily began preparing for rising Long Island Sound tides back in the early 1970s. “Connecticut really has a sound foundation for thinking about resiliency going forward,” she said. “And I intentionally use that word Sound.”
State testing “living shoreline” solutions
Wingfield pointed to socalled living shoreline projects supported by the state and institutions such as Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, which helped
create surgesuppressing artificial reefs, such as those erected southeast of Stratford’s Short Beach, which dissipate storm tides while fostering the return of wetlands.
“They break up the wave action and cause sediment to fall down,” said state Rep. Joe Gresko, DStratford, vice chairman of the legislative Environment Committee, stressing that over the last several years the additional safety from storm surge has resulted in the expansion of beach grasses on the Stratford peninsula, where Prospect Street leads to an Audubon sanctuary that had previously been the property of a gun club.
In New Haven, a wall project is being developed to separate Long Wharf Avenue from Interstate95.
Private homeowners have also been approved for different smallscale approaches to halting shoreline erosion — without building groins out into the Sound — through the reinforcing of existing barriers with smallerstone barriers called ripwrap.
Rebecca French, the director of resilience for the Connecticut Department of Housing, said the big storms have particularly affected lowerincome areas of Bridgeport and New Haven that are located in floodprone areas.
Federal housing grants have allowed the DOH to invest more than $213 million for postSandy recovery and climate resilience.
“The DOH Sandy Team in partnership with our sister agencies and municipalities are using $149 million of these funds to elevate 89 homes out of the floodplain, build 387 units of resilient affordable housing, develop 32 resilience plans, and construct 23 infrastructure projects, including elevated roads for safe evacuation, protection for wastewater treatment plants, backup generators and a microgrid, and 200 green infrastructure bioswales in the City of
New Haven,” she told the governor’s climate commission.
French, a Ph.D., said the state was one of 13 winners in a billiondollar federal Housing and Urban Development competition.
The project aims to protect affordable housing, the University of Bridgeport, multiple historic assets, two power plants, and two substations, including the UI Singer Substation on Henry Street, a transmission hub for the entire New England region, she said.
In neighborhoods along the coast, homeowners trying to remain on their properties are lifting houses at costs of $100,000 or more.
Coastal property a majority of state’s insured locales
Andrew N. Mais, who is also on the governor’s climate panel, said that flooding is currently the mostcommon and costly disaster that the U.S. routinely faces. He stressed that Connecticut’s coastal properties and insured for the sixth highest amount — $675 billion — among the 18 states that face the Atlantic Ocean.
“As weather patterns and moresevere storms and hurricanes rainfall and flooding events change, insurance coverage will become even moreimportant,” Mais said. “Over the course of a 30year mortgage, the chance of flood damage is greater than the chance of fire damage, and it’s not covered by standard homeowners insurance. The value of Connecticut insured coastal property is 65 percent of all the insured property in the state.”
Wingfield, of the DEEP, credited an executive order from early this year in Lamont’s administration, expanding the role of the climate commission.
“One of the critical things that we’re going to be doing, in working with our other state partners, is inventory vulnerable state assets and operations to make sure that the state really has a handle on what’s atrisk associated with our changing climate and what we can do to address that,” she said. “We really need to decide what it is we want Connecticut to look like in 20 years, recognizing the changes that are coming.”
Veteran state Rep. Noreen Kokoruda, RMadison, a former longtime member of her local water pollution control authority, sees an evolution among municipal officials who sense a new urgency in protecting their communities.
“I think since Sandy and Irene, the small towns I’m aware of are all looking at things differently,” she told the coastal caucus. “A lot of them are doing mitigation planning that they never talked about before. And I think too, from my impression of looking at my friends and family in Fairfield and Madison and Stratford, after these last two big storms, there are more changes in those communities than I’ve seen after any of the storms that I remember over the years.”