Conn. Officials Discuss Handling Big Storms

Aug. 23--BRIDGEPORT -- Emergency response officials representing public utilities, the police and social services met Thursday to discuss how to best prepare for a future that will likely have more frequent crippling weather events.

"Climate change is with us," said Joe McGee, vice president of public policy and programs for the Business Council of Fairfield County. "There's no doubt that climate is changing is real, and it will have an impact on land use and zoning and many, many other facets of our lives."

Ultimately, he said, the state will have to make costly changes in infrastructure, improvements that will run into the billions of dollars. This will range from hardening sewage-treatment plants to building dikes around vulnerable neighborhoods to raising or moving critical installations.

"We've avoided this debate in the state of Connecticut," McGee said. "We can't put the public in danger when we know that these risks are upon us."

McGee also called on officials to better coordinate services statewide, something that Connecticut is just beginning to work on.

"You want to look at Florida and what happened to that state in 1985, the year that they got five major hurricanes in one season," he said. "All powerful storms. And what they learned is that the best thing they did was a very simple thing -- to get the utilities, the social service providers and the municipalities together and plan for the next storm."

These preparations need to be wide-ranging -- everything from dealing with the pets of evacuated people to providing dialysis treatments, McGee said.

"This is a whole new conversation," he said. "Let's say you have a company that's installed diesel generators so they can continue to function. How long is the fuel in their tank going to last? Can they get resupplied? Because in Manhattan, after Sandy, this turned out to be a huge problem."

McGee said that if the state can't ensure that businesses can function after a storm, it will have a "huge competitive problem." One way to solve that problem, he said, is to create micro-grids that can function even if the large utilities fail.

"This is where Bridgeport is way ahead of the curve," McGee said. "Bridgeport has two of them; Stamford has none."

McGee said that the utilities in the state have "stepped up and have done really good work," but he was critical of their "lackadaisical" attitude toward tree-trimming over a number of years.

"When you have a tree-trimming budget that's been flat for five years," he said, "you've made a corporate decision not to take care of their system."

McGee said that one of the worst-case scenarios is an ice storm in the middle of winter.

"When you're in a situation where it's winter and you don't have heat for days, maybe weeks, it can get truly scary," he said.

Mayor Bill Finch, sporting a cast on his left wrist -- a souvenir from a family outing at the Wonderland of Ice -- said social networking could go a long way to better inform people during emergencies.

"That's one thing that I'd like to challenge this group on," Finch said to the meeting at the city's Emergency Operations Center on the East Side.

Also speaking was Jim Cole, United Illuminating's director of transmission, distribution, operations and maintenance, who said that the power company will have to spend millions over the next few year to make coastline substations better able to handle storm surges.

"The new 100-year flood line is above our substations," he said. "UI hasn't come up with a plan yet for this, but we'll have to do something in the long term. The new design heights are very challenging."

jburgeson@ctpost.com; 203-330-6403; https://twitter.com/johnburgeson

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