Utilities ready for 2013 hurricane season, says Connecticut's governor

Luther Turmelle in the New Haven Register: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy insists that the state’s utilities are ready to handle whatever the 2013 hurricane season dishes out, despite the fact that a Monday night thunderstorm left 21,000 Connecticut Light & Power customers without power.

“Our storm preparations have never been better,” Malloy said Tuesday at the state’s Emergency Operations Center after meeting for more than a half-hour with state utility executives.

The governor said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an active season this year, with between 13 and 20 named storms, with three to six of them possibly becoming major hurricanes.

Malloy and the utility executives said they have dual goals during this hurricane season, which lasts through the end of October: To strengthen the electric grid to prevent loss of service whenever possible and to restore electricity quickly to homes and businesses.

“Last night’s storm was really severe,” said William Quinlan, senior vice president for emergency preparedness at CL&P. “We can’t prevent every outage.”

Mitch Gross, a CL&P spokesman, said the bulk of Monday night’s outages — 17,000 in East Hartford — were the result of two trees taking out a pair of electric circuits. Gross said the circuits “serve as a major distribution channel” that transfer and control large amounts of electricity...

A dark night at Carbon Based headquarters, shot by Brian Thomas, public domain

Want to see what a hurricane could do?

Jan Ellen Spiegel in the Connecticut Mirror: Nobody had to convince Branford First Selectman Anthony "Unk" DaRos that the water level in Long Island Sound is higher than it used to be. He's spent four decades as a stonemason, much of it raising docks all along the shoreline. "Why would they build a dock that goes underwater at high tide," he asked. "Well they didn't." And now after Tropical Storm Irene laid waste to several waterfront sections of his town, he's embarked on a flood-risk review of every town-owned structure.

He'll have access to more assistance than ever to do that. In the last year The Nature Conservancy has added its Coastal Resilience free web tool, developed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and others, to a growing number of similar ones that help communities map and analyze the potential effects of sea level rise and more frequent and virulent storms.

Connecticut is part of the Conservancy's initial project that includes Long Island and the New York City area. Its complex programming includes parameters for sea level rise and various storm intensities through 2080, with filters that show roads; critical structures like water treatment plants, schools and hospitals; various demographics like income; ecological effects such as salt marsh destruction; and economic factors like replacement cost.

...A white paper the Conservancy expects to release this month will show that a category three storm with the already existing sea level rise would result in temporary flooding in Connecticut of nearly 45,000 acres including 10 airports, five train stations, 645 miles of road and 131 miles of train tracks. Sea level rise alone, it reports, by 2020, could permanently flood 13,00 acres, six airports, 94 miles of road and 20 miles of train tracks.

"You start going from the coast of Connecticut to an archipelago," said Adam Whelchel, an ecologist who is director of science for the Conservancy in Connecticut. "This really wakes people up."...

A Nature Conservancy map of what a Category 2 hurricane could do to East Haven, Connecticut

Deadly floods hit US northeast in wake of Irene

Terra Daily via AFP: Heavy rain on Thursday swamped areas of the US northeast already sodden from Hurricane Irene, with up to five people killed as flash floods forced over 100,000 to leave their homes.

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a flash flood warning for counties in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia, as towns became inundated, busy highways closed down and commuter lines backed up.

US President Barack Obama declared an emergency in New York state, ordering federal agencies to coordinate disaster relief efforts to "save lives and to protect property and public health and safety," the White House said.

Some 100,000 people in Pennsylvania's Luzerne county are under "mandatory evacuation" orders, including 20,000 in the city of Wilkes-Barre, according to local officials….

Flooding persists as US east coast reels from Irene

John Curran in the Associated Press: As emergency airlift operations brought ready-to-eat meals and water to Vermont residents left isolated and desperate, states along the Eastern Seaboard continued to be battered by the after effects of Irene, the destructive hurricane turned tropical storm. Dangerously damaged infrastructure, 2.5 million people without power and thousands of water-logged homes and businesses continued to overshadow the lives of residents and officials from North Carolina through New England, where the storm has been blamed for at least 44 deaths in 13 states.

Raging floodwaters continued to ravage parts of northern New Jersey on Wednesday morning, even after the state's rain-swollen rivers crested and slowly receded. The Passaic River crested Tuesday night, causing extensive flooding and forcing a round of evacuations and rescues in Paterson, the state's third-largest city.

"Been in Paterson all my life, I'm 62 years old, and I've never seen anything like this," said resident Gloria Moses as she gathered with others at the edge of what used to be a network of streets, now covered by a lake. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, after touring Wayne, through which the Passaic also flows, said Tuesday night he saw "just extraordinary despair."

In Connecticut, the Connecticut River at Hartford crested Tuesday evening at 24.8 feet, the highest level since 1987, according to Nicole Belk, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service, in Taunton, Mass. But she said levees helped minimize flooding in riverside communities.

She said the river could still rise slightly farther south, in Middletown, where some streets and neighborhoods were already experiencing minor flooding. Denise Ruzicka, director of inland water resources for Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said flood control dams and basins that New England states installed after 1955 floods helped prevent a catastrophe in the lower Connecticut River basin....

Sunset after Irene passed in Union City, New Jersey, shot by Luigi Novi (or Nightscream), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Coastal communities have new tool to study sea levels

Judy Benson in the Day (Connecticut): Old Saybrook Selectman William Peace saw the immediate utility in being able to visualize the best projections available on the effects of rising sea levels on his town, both for the present and for future decades.

"We're considering reconstructing our police station. I'd like to see the worst case scenario for 2050, when the bonds would be paid off," he said, addressing his request to Nathan Frohling, lower Connecticut River program director for the Nature Conservancy, and Ben Gilmer, conservation geographer for the conservancy's Global Marine Initiative, during a demonstration Wednesday of a new online tool to help towns prepare for climate change effects.

…According to the conservancy, a free online tool can help town officials "analyze the ecological, social and economic impacts" of sea-level rise on their communities and will offer a menu of potential responses. Peace was among more than 50 officials at the workshop from towns along the Connecticut coast, from Fairfield County to New London County, who came to learn how to use the tool. Locally, Old Lyme, Groton, Waterford, Stonington, Salem and East Lyme were represented….

The Amtrak bascule bridge between Old Lyme and Old Saybrook in the open position, shot by Denimadept, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Challenges for the Connecticut coast

The Day (Connecticut): Buffers or barricades? Coastal development or coastal retreat? Marsh loss or marsh replacement? Tough choices like these confront Connecticut, especially its shoreline, as the planet inches toward what experts say is inevitable: swelling seas and intensifying storms as the effects of climate change are felt over the coming decades.

”It's a risk problem,” said Gary Yohe, economics professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown and a member of climate change adaptation panels in New York City and Connecticut. “You can't write a guarantee that it's not going to happen, but you can reduce your exposure and lessen your sensitivity.”

Yohe is also a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sponsored international scientists group that authored a series of authoritative reports on climate change evidence, effects and needed actions. …”Even though sea level rise is happening at an incremental pace,” Yohe said, “people will notice the increasing vulnerability during storms. That will get their attention.”

Much of the talk about climate change thus far has focused on finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the most extreme projections of runaway warming. But adaptation - figuring out how to cope with the effects that can't be avoided - is also part of the discussion.

…Connecticut is among at least eight states and six major U.S. cities that have established panels to begin tackling adaptation. Connecticut's panel, under the wing of the state Department of Environmental Protection, is charged with making recommendations for next steps by the end of this year…

Avery Point Lighthouse, Groton, Connecticut