It was a mild Thanksgiving across the Northeast, with temperatures in the mid-forties across the board, but what kind of weather should we be expecting over the next several months?
According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the Northeast and New England will be seeing cold and snowy weather.
This prediction includes New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Washington D.C.
map via Farmersalmanac.com
To break it down, the Almanac has also posted weather predictions for three to four day spans through the end of January. These predictions report light snow in the beginning of December, with significant snowstorms expected in mid-December and the end of January. Unfortunately, a white Christmas isn’t looking likely this year.
Mental health awareness was the topic of discussion this past Monday night at Mind Body Soul — the second series of the Your Voice Our Quinnipiac events.
Student government organized the event and the Student Veteran Organization (SVO), Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA), and Quinnipiac’s new chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) all co-sponsored, with input from student health services as well.
“Stress relief is good for everyone, but especially right now preparing for the holidays … and preparing for finals … it can be very difficult to balance the academic goals and the personal goals,” said Kerry Patton, Director of Health and Wellness at Quinnipiac. “Managing and learning techniques on how to take care of yourself is really important.”
Patton also discussed with the audience the fact that mental illnesses are not always seen as equal to physical illnesses.
“If someone’s struggling with a certain medical diagnosis we tend to react to things a certain way, and if someone’s struggling with a psychiatric or mental [diagnosis] it seems like it’s different,” she said.
Tatyana Youssef, vice president for student experience, wanted the event to be a way to end the stigma.
“Wherever you’re at in life, mental health is real,” said Youssef. “It’s prevalent. It’s in our society. You know, in previous generations it’s always been there but it was taboo to talk about.”
But students were ready to talk about it. They got up in front of their peers and shared personal stories about their struggles.
Alex Hartman, a member of SVO and army veteran, shocked the audience with his story about his biggest failures in his life, the first being a suicide attempt.
“The first time I tried to kill myself I was 16,” he said.
Hartman described his method to hang himself, and his failed plan. He had tied a bed sheet to a ceiling fan, put it around his neck, and when he let go, the fan couldn’t hold his weight and he fell to the ground.
But it continued. Years later, in the army, Hartman made a second attempt – his “second biggest failure” as he describes it. He said the barrel of his gun was in his mouth, when his friend walked through the door and asked him to go play basketball outside.
“That was the hoop that saved my life,” Hartman said.
Jordan Atchley, president of SVO, also got up to speak.
“I found out my sister was killed in a drunk driving accident I was 12 years old,” he said. “We had just gotten off for Christmas break.”
Atchley explained that that day, he saw his parents “crumble” and he felt he had to be strong for them, so he internalized all of his pain and sadness in order to support them. But then, tragedy struck his family again.
“I was a sophomore in high school, my brother had just gotten back from Iraq, and they told us that he had liver cancer,” Atchley said. “Little did we know he had a year left to live. So when I was a junior in high school, I lost my brother.”
The two tragedies led him to engage in risky behavior, like racing motorcycles. He said he wasn’t trying to kill himself, but he didn’t think it’d be such a bad thing if it happened. Then, he joined the military, which he says taught him a lot about resilience, and allowed him to redirect his emotions towards something good.
Atchley is now studying to become a lawyer.
“One day I hope to change the laws that allowed the guy that killed my sister to be out of jail in three years,” Atchley said. “That’s the driving force behind me.”
Amanda Herbert, SVO Member and Air Force veteran, spoke about the importance of noticing lifestyle changes in yourself or those close to you, as it could be a sign of depression.
“You’ve been taking more naps. You’re just sleeping more in general but your sleep isn’t as good, so you’re sleeping more. And then you’re so tired that you need that candy bar or some kind of not really nutritious snack to get you through the next hour or the next class or the next thing,” Herbert said. “You start living in these one little hour time slots and forgetting that you have a body that you need to nourish so that your mind and everything else can follow through.”
According to Patton, student health services has seen about a 33% increase in the amount of students filling out intake forms for counseling appointments. She says the top three things students come to counseling for are anxiety, depression and relationship issues.
“I think it’s normal to feel stress every day,” Patton said. “Sometimes stress motivates us, sometimes anxiety motivates us. These are natural feelings that you’ll experience.”
Patton said the most important thing is being able to manage your stress at a healthy level so that it doesn’t overwhelm you.
“Yes you need to study a lot, you might need to prepare for a paper or an exam, but [you need] to also take that time for yourself, even if that time is ten minutes … to take care of yourself,” she said.
And while you’re taking care of yourself, don’t forget to do your part to help others too.
“Even the smallest little things that you do for other people can have a huge impact,” said Peter Chlebogiannis, president of Quinnipiac’s chapter of NAMI. “Even an extra second, an extra hello, an extra smile, an extra wave. A lot of us are going through a lot of hard stuff and the more we can be there for each other the better.”
It is the fifth deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history, behind Sandy Hook, where 27 were killed, Virginia Tech, 32 killed, Pulse nightclub, 49 killed, and the Harvest Musical Festival in Las Vegas, just over a month ago, where 58 people were killed.
This time, it happened in a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Twenty-six people are dead and dozens more injured after a shooter opened fire. The victims range in age from 18 months to 77 years old.
“It’s horrific,” the Rev. Douglas House of the Mount Carmel Congregational Church said.
Reverend Douglas J. House – Mount Carmel Congregational Church
The Mount Carmel Congregational Church sits on the corner of Whitney Avenue and Dixwell Avenue, and has been a central part of Hamden’s religious life since colonial times.
“People go to places of worship for safety, security … and to focus on how God works in our lives, to ask for forgiveness, to create peace, to create harmony, all the kinds of good things that we value in our society,” House said. “And that an individual goes into a place of worship … and takes advantage of the things that those people are there for, and ends up killing them, it’s beyond words.”
One mile down the road, also on Whitney Avenue, is Our Lady of Mount Carmel, one of seven Catholic churches in Hamden. Father Michael Dolan has been a priest for 20 years and although he has only been with this particular church for five months, he has deep emotional ties to Connecticut.
“I was present for the Sandy Hook (shooting),” Dolan said. “I had to go and do the notification to the families of their child, and that was awful.”
He recalled the last time he saw one of those families.
“They were in the rose garden with President Obama, and you know the legislation hadn’t gone through,” he said. “They were so upset.”
Dolan wanted some sort of legislation.
Father Michael Dolan – Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church
“People do an awful lot of damage in a short amount of time because of the fire power. You wish they would have gun control, but it’s very hard to push through,” he said, attributing that to the fact that people don’t want their rights taken away, but also adding that it doesn’t have to be that way. “You can have a gun, but do you really have to have a machine gun? It’s amazing. Armor piercing bullets? Really? Is the deer wearing body armor?”
Nearly five years later, gun control legislation still hasn’t passed, which Dolan says has led to parishioners wanting to take matters into their own hands.
“In my last parish I had two parishioners that would say ‘You know, Father, I’m packing in case there’s a problem, I’ll take them out,’” Dolan said, adding that he knows that would never end well.
He says he doesn’t want to give the impression that the church is a target, but it is one, being a public building and a “symbolically charged space” with a wide-open floor plan. He says he wants the church to be safe, but he admits that it’s difficult to maintain safety when you’re welcoming to anyone. Dolan says parishioners have become hyper-aware during services.
“I noticed after the Las Vegas shooting there was a loud noise in church, and I could tell people were like ‘Is it a shooter?’” Dolan said. “United Illuminating was doing construction, and the backhoe hit the sidewalk and they all jumped. You could tell, but I had to keep my composure.”
But House says hyper-awareness doesn’t equate to fear.
“I think it’s human nature. Maybe we’re more aware of our surroundings today than we used to be, but I don’t think people in my congregation and certainly I’m not any more fearful than I ever have been,” he said.
House and Dolan both want the focus to be on the positives during times like these and after events as horrific as this.
“It can happen anywhere, but you don’t dwell on that,” House said. “If you lived your life constantly thinking about terrorism, the terrorists would’ve won, as so many people have said. So you live your life the way you intend to.”
Dolan’s face lit up with a smile from ear to ear as he talked about all the engagement rings he has blessed, the beautiful babies he has baptized, and the many first communions he has given. And then, he referenced Holy Scripture.
The 2017 Atlantic hurricaneseason has already proven to be extremely active and extremely dangerous. So far this year there have been 15 storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (category 3 or stronger). These weather systems have resulted in more than 400 deaths, and more than $188 billion in damages. Connecticut has been spared the worst, but there is still a month to go in the season.
Connecticut’s coastline (photo via Google Earth)
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tested the limits of Connecticut’s emergency preparedness programs. According to the National Weather Service, Sandy was a “worse-case scenario for storm surge for coastal regions.” By the time Sandy got to New Jersey, it was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, but the storm surge hit Connecticut right at high tide, causing massive amounts of flooding.
The Tropical Cyclone Report created by the National Hurricane Center reports that there was storm surge over nine feet in New Haven, resulting in floodwaters as high as six feet above ground level. Approximately 3,000 homes were damaged, and the state sustained more than $300 million in damages.
Five years later, is the state of Connecticut ready for another hurricane… or not?
Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations – New Haven
“Our biggest fear in the city of New Haven is a hurricane,” says Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations in New Haven. “It’s number one. It really is. We’re on the coast, and I think we’re pretty resilient, but when storm surge hits … that becomes a very significant issue.”
In the event of a hurricane, Fontana would work to develop strategies that will lessen the impact of a storm, plan and prepare for different types of storms, and help with the response to and recovery from a storm.
Fontana also serves as one of five regional coordinators in the state for emergency management. His job there is to communicate with the 30 towns in Connecticut’s Region 2 throughout an emergency, and relay information up to the state coordinators.
Quinnipiac’s Plan for Emergencies
Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, falls under Region 2. Edgar Rodriguez is the chief of Public Safety and is also co-captain of the emergency management team at Quinnipiac. The team is made up of about a dozen members from various university departments, including public safety, facilities, health services, and academics. Rodriguez says the team has extensive plans when it comes to storms.
“We’ve come up with an emergency evacuation plan and we talk about if there’s a hurricane or a storm coming, what are we doing, how are we preparing for it,” Rodriguez says, adding that although the plans haven’t been approved by the state, they are still important to have.
When a storm comes, those plans get put into action.
The team begins a 24-hour-to-landfall. Members track the storm, gather information from the state and submit that information to Quinnipiac President John Lahey and Provost Mark Thompson, who ultimately decide whether students should stay at school or be sent home.
Once that decision is made, the emergency management team starts prepping all departments for landfall. Quinnipiac’s emergency management team only goes through the regional coordinators for assistance if it’s a minor, isolated emergency – such as power outages on one specific campus. In the case of an event as major as a hurricane, the protocol is to bypass the region and work directly with the state.
“The rule of thumb is every town or city should be able to sustain themselves for 72 hours,” Rodriguez says, explaining that Quinnipiac acts as its own sort of town for those 72 hours after landfall, with the emergency management team in charge. “Then after that, you start getting assistance from the state. But the entire time that’s happening, you’re communicating back and forth with the state.”
All the information goes up to the state emergency operations center in Hartford, is organized and then is sent out to the public.
“Every hour [the state is] sending us an update on the storm and we take that update and send it to everybody,” says Rodriguez. He feels that this system of organizing the information is a good way to keep consistency and keep everybody on the same page at a time when there could be a lot going on at once.
A building-Block Approach
Dan McElhinney, federal preparedness coordinator and national preparedness division director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explains that everyone takes a building-block approach for providing and receiving assistance after 72 hours.
“At some point [the town] may have to bring in mutual aid from surrounding communities,” McElhinney says. “When the mutual aid has been exhausted, they’ll ask for county level assistance, then they go to the state … then the state will declare a state of emergency. The governor then gets special powers to extend additional dollars to direct other state agencies to assist the local community. When the state no longer has the capacity, the governor will ask the president for an emergency or major disaster declaration. That’s when FEMA gets involved.”
FEMA’s regions (photo via FEMA.gov)
FEMA is divided into 10 regions, and McElhinney is in charge of FEMA Region 1, which includes all New England states. He says although FEMA can respond in numbers that would outweigh the state help 100-to-1, they are there to support, not to supplant.
“Basically under the Stafford Act, we pretty much have tasking authority over all the agencies and departments to assist the state in response and recovery,” McElhinney says. “We provide a lot of technical assistance, but we are not there to take over.”
Mandatory training
Not only does FEMA provide assistance in the aftermath, but it also provides training services. According to the Quinnipiac website, those who are on the emergency management team have to complete FEMA’s National Incident Management System training. This training is similar to the statewide Emergency Preparedness and Planning Initiative training exercises.
Map of Hurricane Maria on the monitor in the New Haven EOC
“The state of Connecticut has gotten very aggressive on keeping everyone prepared,” Rodriguez says. “Every year in October or November we do a drill. It’s mandatory for every town and every city through the state of Connecticut and the last few years have been some type of a hurricane.”
During the two-day statewide drill, state officials provide updates as if there were a real hurricane approaching. The state sends out maps of the storm and asks participants to respond to ongoing situations.
“You just lost all power in your town, what are you doing? You’ve got multiple trees that are down, what are you doing? Are you opening up a shelter? How are you transporting people? How much help do you have? Is the fire department on standby? And you have to keep reporting back and forth,” Rodriguez says.
Emergency operations center – New Haven
The exercises are meant to be intense, but they’re also meant to replicate a real-life situation so that if and when a hurricane does hit, everyone is prepared. And apparently, you can never be too prepared.
“When a hurricane strikes, people kind of become complacent and never think it’s going to be as bad as it is. We’ve been fortunate, but … our departments on the preparedness level always scale one level higher than we normally would,” says Fontana. “We’re always prepared but we always prepare above and beyond because it’s easier for us to scale back than it is to scale up in the middle of a crisis.”
The training drills are mandatory for cities and towns that want to receive grant money in order to build resiliency in places along the shorelines or rebuild after a weather event occurs.
coastal resiliency and innovative thinking
Giovanni Zinn, city engineer – New Haven (photo via Yale.edu)
Giovanni Zinn, an engineer for the City of New Haven, explains why that grant money is so important.
“There’s a lot more land now and it’s low lying land,” he says. “In the large storms we face two major threats: coastal storm surge, where water is piling up in the harbor and coming up the rivers, and large rain events of six, seven, eight, nine, 10 inches in a short period of time. Where does the water go? When you get both at the same time, you have a particularly bad problem. And there’s no getting around the laws of physics. There are certain situations where you can’t drain the city.”
Zinn says that coastal protection methods — seawalls, living shorelines and storm surge barriers that are employed in some areas of the state — are “extremely expensive” and put financial pressure on local communities. He also said he thinks that those preventative measures are “not really a priority” and the long-term thinking tends to be put on the back burner.
But Guilford town planner George Kral says that hard infrastructure like a seawall is actually discouraged by the state of Connecticut.
“The view is that it doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes the problem from one place to another,” Kral says, adding that if anything, the goal is to implement green infrastructure instead.
Towns like Guilford have already completed major projects to raise the lowest-lying roads above flood level, as part of the town’s coastal resiliency plan. According to the plan, “coastal resilience is the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to coastal hazards such as sea level rise, increased flooding, and more frequent and intense storm surges.” Kral says the plan has two goals: to educate the public on the the importance of coastal resilience, and to suggest actions local governments could take to make themselves more resilient.
And Guilford isn’t the only place thinking about preventative measures.
David Kooris, Director of the Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience programs (photo via CT.gov)
David Kooris, the Director of the Rebuild By Design and National Disaster Resilience programs for the state Department of Housing, says that after Hurricane Sandy, the federal government reserved about a billion dollars in relief funding to be “competitively awarded to places that demonstrated a new way of recovery that better positioned them to be more resilient for future disasters.”
In 2012, the state of Connecticut had already received $160 million in federal disaster relief money, and was looking for more from the department of housing’s two competitions.
“Teams worked over the course of a few months and put together a proposal to the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and to a jury of architects and urban planners to compete for portions of the discretionary funds,” Kooris says about the international Rebuild by Design program. “Seven out of the 10 were awarded funding – the largest being lower Manhattan at $330 million, and the smallest being Bridgeport and the State of Connecticut with $10 million.”
Based on the success of that first program, Kooris says HUD took another chunk of the Sandy money and created a new competition — this time at the national level — which became the National Disaster Resilience program. There were 68 eligible government entities (states, cities and counties) that could enter the competition, and 13 were awarded funding at the end – Connecticut coming in 9th place with $54 million.
Kooris says the purpose of competitively divvying the money up was to “move beyond the standard recovery funding through HUD and FEMA, which more than anything else is just rebuilding.” The programs forced cities and towns to work on disaster prevention, rather than disaster recovery.
“Rarely you get the type of project that is new infrastructure – not repairing what was damaged – and do so in a way that explicitly addresses social and economic vulnerabilities in addition to environmental vulnerabilities,” Kooris says.
Connecticut’s plan involved combining “grey and green approaches” as Kooris puts it, by using “traditional, hard engineered solutions combined with natural solutions that mimic the functions of the environment.” He says that the state is planning to raise roads, build berms and add other green infrastructure to mitigate flooding in Bridgeport, in addition to pinpointing other coastal locations with the greatest number of critical facilities — power plants, roads, hospitals, wastewater treatment — and putting the majority of the investments into protecting those places.
where connecticut stands now
Since Sandy, officials have had five years to revise and strengthen emergency weather response plans.
“We have developed an emergency operation plan that’s worked on on a daily basis,” Fontana says. “Our primary goals … are preparing our residents, making sure that they’re prepared for any type of a disaster and making sure our infrastructure is protected.”
If another hurricane hit tomorrow, there are mixed feelings on whether Connecticut would be ready.
“If it were some kind of extreme storm like a category 5, that is a whole ‘nother ball game. The impact would be severe,” Kral says about the town of Guilford. “Hopefully we’ve done a little better job in terms of planning, but that remains to be seen I guess. If we had 50 inches of rain, we’d have a lot of problems.”
Kooris acknowledges there are still some things that need to be worked on, but for the most part, he says he is “confident that we have implemented targeted infrastructure projects … that reduce risk from future storms.”
As far as Quinnipiac goes, Rodriguez admits “you’re never going to be 100 percent” prepared, but he is confident that the annual mandatory state training has everyone as prepared as they can be to respond.
And in New Haven, Fontana recognizes that a category 3 hurricane “would be devastation to the entire coast” but he is confident in his department, which he says “works every day” and “works hard.”
“We prepare all the time. We plan all the time. We don’t respond all the time, and we don’t recover all the time, but we’re confident that we have the necessary strategies in place to handle a hurricane,” Fontana says.
Adding to his confidence is the fact that FEMA recently awarded the city of New Haven a class 7 rating for flood preparedness and recovery – the highest rating available. Having this rating allows homes in the designated 100-year flood zone to get a 15 percent discount on flood insurance. “So I think that puts it in a nutshell.”
The most important thing through it all? Keeping the lines of communication open, Fontana says, at all times.
“Consistent, timely, good information. I always say, ‘Be first, be right.’”
The 2017 Atlantic hurricaneseason has already proven to be extremely active and extremely dangerous. So far this year there have been 15 storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (category 3 or stronger). These weather systems have resulted in more than 400 deaths, and more than $188 billion in damages. Connecticut has been spared the worst, but there is still a month to go in the season.
Connecticut’s coastline (photo via Google Earth)
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tested the limits of Connecticut’s emergency preparedness programs. According to the National Weather Service, Sandy was a “worse-case scenario for storm surge for coastal regions.” By the time Sandy got to New Jersey, it was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, but the storm surge hit Connecticut right at high tide, causing massive amounts of flooding.
The Tropical Cyclone Report created by the National Hurricane Center reports that there was storm surge over nine feet in New Haven, resulting in floodwaters as high as six feet above ground level. Approximately 3,000 homes were damaged, and the state sustained more than $300 million in damages.
Five years later, is the state of Connecticut ready for another hurricane… or not?
Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations – New Haven
“Our biggest fear in the city of New Haven is a hurricane,” says Rick Fontana, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations in New Haven. “It’s number one. It really is. We’re on the coast, and I think we’re pretty resilient, but when storm surge hits … that becomes a very significant issue.”
In the event of a hurricane, Fontana would work to develop strategies that will lessen the impact of a storm, plan and prepare for different types of storms, and help with the response to and recovery from a storm.
Fontana also serves as one of five regional coordinators in the state for emergency management. His job there is to communicate with the 30 towns in Connecticut’s Region 2 throughout an emergency, and relay information up to the state coordinators.
Quinnipiac’s Plan for Emergencies
Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, falls under Region 2. Edgar Rodriguez is the chief of Public Safety and is also co-captain of the emergency management team at Quinnipiac. The team is made up of about a dozen members from various university departments, including public safety, facilities, health services, and academics. Rodriguez says the team has extensive plans when it comes to storms.
“We’ve come up with an emergency evacuation plan and we talk about if there’s a hurricane or a storm coming, what are we doing, how are we preparing for it,” Rodriguez says, adding that although the plans haven’t been approved by the state, they are still important to have.
When a storm comes, those plans get put into action.
The team begins a 24-hour-to-landfall. Members track the storm, gather information from the state and submit that information to Quinnipiac President John Lahey and Provost Mark Thompson, who ultimately decide whether students should stay at school or be sent home.
Once that decision is made, the emergency management team starts prepping all departments for landfall. Quinnipiac’s emergency management team only goes through the regional coordinators for assistance if it’s a minor, isolated emergency – such as power outages on one specific campus. In the case of an event as major as a hurricane, the protocol is to bypass the region and work directly with the state.
“The rule of thumb is every town or city should be able to sustain themselves for 72 hours,” Rodriguez says, explaining that Quinnipiac acts as its own sort of town for those 72 hours after landfall, with the emergency management team in charge. “Then after that, you start getting assistance from the state. But the entire time that’s happening, you’re communicating back and forth with the state.”
All the information goes up to the state emergency operations center in Hartford, is organized and then is sent out to the public.
“Every hour [the state is] sending us an update on the storm and we take that update and send it to everybody,” says Rodriguez. He feels that this system of organizing the information is a good way to keep consistency and keep everybody on the same page at a time when there could be a lot going on at once.
A building-Block Approach
Dan McElhinney, federal preparedness coordinator and national preparedness division director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explains that everyone takes a building-block approach for providing and receiving assistance after 72 hours.
“At some point [the town] may have to bring in mutual aid from surrounding communities,” McElhinney says. “When the mutual aid has been exhausted, they’ll ask for county level assistance, then they go to the state … then the state will declare a state of emergency. The governor then gets special powers to extend additional dollars to direct other state agencies to assist the local community. When the state no longer has the capacity, the governor will ask the president for an emergency or major disaster declaration. That’s when FEMA gets involved.”
FEMA’s regions (photo via FEMA.gov)
FEMA is divided into 10 regions, and McElhinney is in charge of FEMA Region 1, which includes all New England states. He says although FEMA can respond in numbers that would outweigh the state help 100-to-1, they are there to support, not to supplant.
“Basically under the Stafford Act, we pretty much have tasking authority over all the agencies and departments to assist the state in response and recovery,” McElhinney says. “We provide a lot of technical assistance, but we are not there to take over.”
Mandatory training
Not only does FEMA provide assistance in the aftermath, but it also provides training services. According to the Quinnipiac website, those who are on the emergency management team have to complete FEMA’s National Incident Management System training. This training is similar to the statewide Emergency Preparedness and Planning Initiative training exercises.
Map of Hurricane Maria on the monitor in the New Haven EOC
“The state of Connecticut has gotten very aggressive on keeping everyone prepared,” Rodriguez says. “Every year in October or November we do a drill. It’s mandatory for every town and every city through the state of Connecticut and the last few years have been some type of a hurricane.”
During the two-day statewide drill, state officials provide updates as if there were a real hurricane approaching. The state sends out maps of the storm and asks participants to respond to ongoing situations.
“You just lost all power in your town, what are you doing? You’ve got multiple trees that are down, what are you doing? Are you opening up a shelter? How are you transporting people? How much help do you have? Is the fire department on standby? And you have to keep reporting back and forth,” Rodriguez says.
Emergency operations center – New Haven
The exercises are meant to be intense, but they’re also meant to replicate a real-life situation so that if and when a hurricane does hit, everyone is prepared. And apparently, you can never be too prepared.
“When a hurricane strikes, people kind of become complacent and never think it’s going to be as bad as it is. We’ve been fortunate, but … our departments on the preparedness level always scale one level higher than we normally would,” says Fontana. “We’re always prepared but we always prepare above and beyond because it’s easier for us to scale back than it is to scale up in the middle of a crisis.”
The training drills are mandatory for cities and towns that want to receive grant money in order to build resiliency in places along the shorelines or rebuild after a weather event occurs.
coastal resiliency and innovative thinking
Giovanni Zinn, city engineer – New Haven (photo via Yale.edu)
Giovanni Zinn, an engineer for the City of New Haven, explains why that grant money is so important.
“There’s a lot more land now and it’s low lying land,” he says. “In the large storms we face two major threats: coastal storm surge, where water is piling up in the harbor and coming up the rivers, and large rain events of six, seven, eight, nine, 10 inches in a short period of time. Where does the water go? When you get both at the same time, you have a particularly bad problem. And there’s no getting around the laws of physics. There are certain situations where you can’t drain the city.”
Zinn says that coastal protection methods — seawalls, living shorelines and storm surge barriers that are employed in some areas of the state — are “extremely expensive” and put financial pressure on local communities. He also said he thinks that those preventative measures are “not really a priority” and the long-term thinking tends to be put on the back burner.
But Guilford town planner George Kral says that hard infrastructure like a seawall is actually discouraged by the state of Connecticut.
“The view is that it doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes the problem from one place to another,” Kral says, adding that if anything, the goal is to implement green infrastructure instead.
Towns like Guilford have already completed major projects to raise the lowest-lying roads above flood level, as part of the town’s coastal resiliency plan. According to the plan, “coastal resilience is the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to coastal hazards such as sea level rise, increased flooding, and more frequent and intense storm surges.” Kral says the plan has two goals: to educate the public on the the importance of coastal resilience, and to suggest actions local governments could take to make themselves more resilient.
And Guilford isn’t the only place thinking about preventative measures.
David Kooris, Director of the Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience programs (photo via CT.gov)
David Kooris, the Director of the Rebuild By Design and National Disaster Resilience programs for the state Department of Housing, says that after Hurricane Sandy, the federal government reserved about a billion dollars in relief funding to be “competitively awarded to places that demonstrated a new way of recovery that better positioned them to be more resilient for future disasters.”
In 2012, the state of Connecticut had already received $160 million in federal disaster relief money, and was looking for more from the department of housing’s two competitions.
“Teams worked over the course of a few months and put together a proposal to the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and to a jury of architects and urban planners to compete for portions of the discretionary funds,” Kooris says about the international Rebuild by Design program. “Seven out of the 10 were awarded funding – the largest being lower Manhattan at $330 million, and the smallest being Bridgeport and the State of Connecticut with $10 million.”
Based on the success of that first program, Kooris says HUD took another chunk of the Sandy money and created a new competition — this time at the national level — which became the National Disaster Resilience program. There were 68 eligible government entities (states, cities and counties) that could enter the competition, and 13 were awarded funding at the end – Connecticut coming in 9th place with $54 million.
Kooris says the purpose of competitively divvying the money up was to “move beyond the standard recovery funding through HUD and FEMA, which more than anything else is just rebuilding.” The programs forced cities and towns to work on disaster prevention, rather than disaster recovery.
“Rarely you get the type of project that is new infrastructure – not repairing what was damaged – and do so in a way that explicitly addresses social and economic vulnerabilities in addition to environmental vulnerabilities,” Kooris says.
Connecticut’s plan involved combining “grey and green approaches” as Kooris puts it, by using “traditional, hard engineered solutions combined with natural solutions that mimic the functions of the environment.” He says that the state is planning to raise roads, build berms and add other green infrastructure to mitigate flooding in Bridgeport, in addition to pinpointing other coastal locations with the greatest number of critical facilities — power plants, roads, hospitals, wastewater treatment — and putting the majority of the investments into protecting those places.
where connecticut stands now
Since Sandy, officials have had five years to revise and strengthen emergency weather response plans.
“We have developed an emergency operation plan that’s worked on on a daily basis,” Fontana says. “Our primary goals … are preparing our residents, making sure that they’re prepared for any type of a disaster and making sure our infrastructure is protected.”
If another hurricane hit tomorrow, there are mixed feelings on whether Connecticut would be ready.
“If it were some kind of extreme storm like a category 5, that is a whole ‘nother ball game. The impact would be severe,” Kral says about the town of Guilford. “Hopefully we’ve done a little better job in terms of planning, but that remains to be seen I guess. If we had 50 inches of rain, we’d have a lot of problems.”
Kooris acknowledges there are still some things that need to be worked on, but for the most part, he says he is “confident that we have implemented targeted infrastructure projects … that reduce risk from future storms.”
As far as Quinnipiac goes, Rodriguez admits “you’re never going to be 100 percent” prepared, but he is confident that the annual mandatory state training has everyone as prepared as they can be to respond.
And in New Haven, Fontana recognizes that a category 3 hurricane “would be devastation to the entire coast” but he is confident in his department, which he says “works every day” and “works hard.”
“We prepare all the time. We plan all the time. We don’t respond all the time, and we don’t recover all the time, but we’re confident that we have the necessary strategies in place to handle a hurricane,” Fontana says.
Adding to his confidence is the fact that FEMA recently awarded the city of New Haven a class 7 rating for flood preparedness and recovery – the highest rating available. Having this rating allows homes in the designated 100-year flood zone to get a 15 percent discount on flood insurance. “So I think that puts it in a nutshell.”
The most important thing through it all? Keeping the lines of communication open, Fontana says, at all times.
“Consistent, timely, good information. I always say, ‘Be first, be right.’”
After Harvey Weinstein, the 65-year-old American film producer and former film studio executive who allegedly sexually assaulted and raped multiple women, was fired, victims all over the world came forward with their stories.
Alyssa Milano, an American actress, activist, producer and former singer, started a trending hashtag that went international: #metoo.
Although not many Quinnipiac students opened up about their stories, they did react to the news and the resources available on campus.
Quinnipiac University provides multiple resources for victims of sexual assault and rape.
Confidential resources on campus include health services, counseling services and clergy. Any information shared with people in these departments is not required to be reported.
There are also “responsible employees” on campus – also known as mandated reporters – who are required to report incidents of sexual violence, harassment or discrimination to the university Title IX coordinator immediately. People in this category include all faculty, administration, athletic, human resources, public safety, student affairs and student paraprofessionals (resident assistants and orientation leaders while they are still under contract).
According to the student handbook, “prompt reporting of such incidents makes investigation of the incident more effective and enhances the ability of the university to take action on a complaint.”
Quinnipiac’s Title IX coordinator is Terri Johnson. The Deputy Title IX coordinator for incidents involving faculty, staff and vendors is Stephanie Mathews, and the Deputy Title IX coordinator for incidents involving students, visitors and persons who are not affiliated with Quinnipiac is Seann Kalagher.
If a victim wants to open up a Title IX investigation, they can choose to end the investigation at any point. The coordinators will only share information on a need-to-know basis throughout the investigation, but it’s important to note that these investigations can sometimes take a very long time – weeks or even months.
If a victim chooses to go to the health center, they can be tested for gonorrhea and chlamydia and given medication for both. The health center also provides plan-B medication. The health center will go over the options with the victim, should he or she want to report it to the Title IX coordinators or to the police, or go to the hospital.
The hospital can provide a few things that the health center can not– a rape kit, HIV testing and HIV post-exposure prophylaxis, which is medication taken so that the infection does not develop.
Christy Chase, director of student health services at Quinnipiac, is one of three sexual assault nurse examiners (SANE) that works in the health center. SANE nurses are registered nurses who have completed specialized courses related to medical forensic care of sexually assaulted or abused patients. She says the Title IX coordinators and police officers have a job to get information out of the victim as soon as possible, but she tries to shelter them from that.
“We’re very protective of the student in that moment,” Chase says. “Our first priority is finding out medically if this person is okay. That’s gotta be the first thing.”
Since the situation can be overwhelming, Chase tries to protect the privacy of the victims as much as possible.
“I don’t want it to become a circus with students and staff,” she says. “We need to keep the perimeter, and when I was on nightside I would almost throw people out of the waiting room.”
Chase says many students choose not to go to the health center because of the misconception that it will immediately start an investigation.
When it comes to sexual assault, investigations are only started when a victim goes to a non-confidential resource, and parents are only contacted by the health center if a student is transported to a medical facility by ambulance. But, health services does not have to say why the student was transported by ambulance.
Chase used to work in an emergency room as a sexual abuse examiner. She stresses the importance of getting a rape kit done, saying it’s vital to collect the evidence right now even if one doesn’t want to press any charges. If a person is to change their mind in the future, the hospital will be holding onto the kit.
The #metoo movement has empowered many victims to come forward, but Chase says if anyone feels triggered by the posts, confidential counseling services are a great resource as well.
“I don’t want there to be barriers for students to not come in and get the help that they need,” Chase says. “We don’t want them to be afraid.”
