Sophie Sonnenfeld Photo
Lake Tweed Friday morning.
PERKINS EASTMAN
Future vision: Stormwater ribbon park anchoring design for protecting Long Wharf from climate change-sparked storms.
Friday’s flash floods across New Haven offered a preview of challenges to come with climate change — and the city plans to sift through the aftermath for more clues about how to prepare.
That was the upshot of a 2 p.m. press conference inside the city Emergency Operations Center in the sub-basement of 200 Orange St.
City officials and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro held the press conference to look both back and ahead as Tropical Storm Elsa finished passing through New Haven.
NHFD
No parking: Flooded exit at Temple garage at MLK/Legion Ave.
Sophie Sonnenfeld Photo
Conditions monitored Friday inside the Emergency Operations Center.
New Haven didn’t bear the brunt of the storm. The peak here lasted a couple of hours Friday morning. Winds remained under 30 miles per hour for the most part. At one point 300 city customers lost power; United Illuminating was working on restoring that power.
But the rain came fast and furious, dropping two inches just between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. That made the difference: Major roads throughout town were flooded and closed. Firefighters went to Tweed New Haven Airport to pump a foot of water out of the terminal. As usual in a storm, Union Avenue by the train station and police station turned into a river.
City of New Haven
The river formerly known as 1 Union Ave., Friday morning.
“We took a real beating from the rain,” reported city emergency management chief Rick Fontana.
At least 15 spots across town were completely inundated and closed off. These included:
• The area around the police station.
• The 101 College St. construction site downtown.
• The Lombard and Humphrey underpass in Fair Haven.
• Middletown Avenue from the I‑91 exit ramp to AMR headquarters.
The police and fire departments received about 40 calls for service related to the storm, Fontana said. Only one tree was reported down, on Chapel Street in Fair Haven.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn noted that rainfall from early in the week added to the inability of the storm sewers to quickly flush out the fast-falling rain.
“Water flows downhill. It affects the size of the hill. The bigger and steeper your hill is, the faster the water runs down. If you’re raising the bottom of the hill,” the problem increases, he said in response to a reporter’s question, offering what turned into a mini-seminar on stormwater management. (Click on the above video to watch the full press conference. Normally, the Union Avenue stretch by the train station is five feet above sea level at high tide. Because of the previous rainfall, it was more like three feet when the storm hit Friday morning, leaving “less gravitational head,” meaning “pressure being able to push water through our pipes.”
Asked about why a manhole popped up on George Street during the storm, Zinn said that much of downtown is close to sea level, with a “complex network of pipes” dating back to the 1800s.
Zinn at EOC briefing: Nature is a teacher.
“We’re going to see more and more these type of storms as climate change impacts the world,” noted Mayor Justin Elicker. He and DeLauro said funding contained in the infrastructure bill before Congress will help New Haven work on its streets and sewage systems to prepare for that.
New Haven has already begun preparing, with a series of projects and plans in place on Long Wharf, by the train station, and downtown; and a coast resiliency plan for neighborhoods from Morris Cove to Beaver Hills. Click here and here to read about that.
Zinn said his team will be examining what happened Friday morning for “lessons” to apply to that planning and future work.
“We are working on many things already,” he said after the press conference. “Storms like this give us finer definition of what exactly to expect.”
Sophie Sonnenfeld Photo
Overflowing gutters in Tweed’s parking lot.
