Lucy Fernandez, manager of Christ Bread of Life Soup Kitchen
Only a few miles up the road on Dixwell Avenue, volunteers spend time cooking large meals at the Christ Bread of Life Soup Kitchen.
According to manager Lucy Fernandez, the soup kitchen – formerly known as St. Ann’s Soup Kitchen – provides meals to anywhere between 50 to 150 homeless, unemployed and underemployed people a day.
Fernandez greets each person by name, with a bright smile on her face, as they walk through the door.
“We feed them on a daily basis, from Monday through Friday and we serve them lunch. We serve them a full course meal, which would be with a starch, a soup, a vegetable, a meat and dessert,” Fernandez explained. “It’s like a restaurant.”
Aside from serving people home-cooked meals, the volunteers at the soup kitchen also offer access to a food pantry. The pantry is stocked with various canned goods and other non-perishable food items.
“Every Friday, we give them bags of groceries. They get on a list. For the holidays we give them a special meal. If we have any coats, as part of a new program, we give them clothing and coats,” Fernandez said.
And since the kitchen is closed on Christmas because it’s an official church holiday, Fernandez thinks ahead to make sure no one goes hungry.
“What I do is I bag food to take with them. So what I will do is, I make them a big holiday dinner the day before. And then I give them the bags to make sure they have food,” Fernandez said.
She also communicates with other local churches to see who is going to be open on days like holidays.
“Other churches give us flyers, so we give flyers out. No one goes without eating that day … nobody goes a holiday without eating,” Fernandez said.
Aside from food, Fernandez says the most important thing they give to the individuals is a sense of hope.
“We speak to them and encourage them and build them up. We’re friends to them. I don’t want just know a face, I want to know their name, I want to interact with them.” Fernandez said. “They’re already suffering, so we nurture them and we care for them.”
This October didn’t see much flu activity, even though it is the first month of flu season. However, the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention reported on Thursday that November saw an increase of people who got sick.
The CDC said the Influenza A virus was the most commonly identified. The amount of identified illnesses was higher than usual for this time of the year.
To avoid getting the flu, Christy Chase, the director of student health services at Quinnipiac University, said everyone should get the flu shot as soon as they possibly can.
“We feel that the best time of the year to get it is October or November to get the flu vaccine,” Chase said. “A lot of places are offering it much sooner. But the efficacy of it is really six months, and what we find here in the health center is when we see most flu (symptoms) is March. So we want to try and carry it through that time when people are living in communal housing, so we find that we want to wait a little bit. The unfortunate problem is that a lot of the programs in the health sciences want them by Oct. 1, so we’ll probably have to adjust next year.”
Quinnipiac held several flu clinics in October and November for students and faculty. This year the school ordered 3,000 flu vaccinations. Chase said the turnout for the flu clinic was “great” as there are only 100 vaccinations left.
“It’s huge…I think this year we did better than last year,” Chase said.
Chase still wants to see more college students – especially those with other health problems – get the vaccination.
“I feel like (college students) don’t necessarily feel the need to get it,” Chase said. “We definitely, in just medical professionals across the board, people with diabetes, asthma or chronic conditions certainly should get it.”
Chase also doesn’t want people to feel discouraged from getting the vaccination because of possible side effects they have heard.
Photo credit: CDC
“You shouldn’t get the flu from it, but you might get a little bit of not feeling well as that’s your body trying to start its boost towards immunity for the flu,” Chase said. “It’s not always 100 percent effective as it’s based off of last year’s flu strain. If the strain has changed at all, then you could still be at risk, but that’s just how it is, there’s nothing we can do about that right now.”
38.6 percent of toddlers six months or younger have had the flu vaccination. 38.8 percent of children from six months to 17-years-old have received the flu vaccine. 38.5 percent of adults 18-years-old and older have received the flu vaccine, according to the CDC.
If you are a Quinnipiac student or staff member that hasn’t received the flu vaccination, Chase highly encourages you to make an appointment with the school’s health center before it runs out.
Walking into the student center, a winter wonderland appears just seconds after opening the door. Friendly snowmen line the tables, as do pine branches and glittering flakes of fake snow. Christmas music echoes throughout the building, playing softly behind the laughs and conversations that come from the students eating their dinner.
This scene is nothing new to Quinnipiac University. On Thursday, Dec. 7, Quinnipiac hosted its annual Holiday Dinner. The festive event has become a school tradition – a tradition that has been around for 33 years.
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Jill Martin, professor of law and chair of the Holiday Dinner Committee, has been a part of the Holiday Dinner for all 33 years. In fact, she was one of the people that started the tradition.
“We wanted to get everybody together. It’s the one event on campus, frankly, that has both students, faculty, staff, administration, Chartwells, everybody on campus involved, or can be involved if they so choose,” Martin said. “And we wanted to offer something for the students before they left for the break and before they start their exams.”
Martin based the dinner off of several events she attended as a student at Keuka College. The school hosted a Christmas dinner for the students as well as an Italian dinner where the faculty served the students. Martin decided to use a combination of both as her template for the Holiday Dinner at Quinnipiac.
“In the beginning we played around a bit with the menu and we tried different things, and now we basically have the menu set,” Martin said. “This works really well and it’s a good menu, and you get roast beef or turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy and pasta.”
The Holiday Dinner requires an impressive amount of food preparation, according to Leean Spaulding, the director of dining at Quinnipiac. The staff starts preparing the meal the day before the event. The large food orders and decorations are ordered a month prior.
The food order includes: 320 pounds of roast beef, 560 pounds of roast turkey, 100 pounds of pasta, 15 gallons of marinara sauce, 20 gallons of alfredo sauce, 132 pounds of broccoli, 120 pounds of carrots, 440 pounds of mashed potatoes, 100 dozen dinner rolls and 186 assorted pies.
Preparation for the Holiday Dinner includes more than ordering the food. In fact, the Holiday Dinner Committee holds up to three meetings a year to prepare and organize, and none of it would be possible without the 120 volunteers that pitch in their time each year. For Martin, the students’ reactions are worth all of the dedication and hard work.
Currently, the school gives out 2,000 Holiday Dinner tickets to students. However, only about 1,500 students regularly attend the dinner. Martin would like to see the number grow within the next few years.
“We’d like students to know more about it because we really are trying to give something back to the students. We all know everybody’s stressed now. We all know how busy everybody is. We’re busy, we’re stressed too, but we wanted to do something for an hour to make you have a nice time,” Martin said.
On May 10, 2016, the life of Hamden resident Sue Higgins changed forever. She received news that she prayed would never come, but always lingered as a harsh possibility, like a dark cloud hovering over her suburban household. No one wants to believe a family member can be lost to drug addiction, but Higgins was faced with that devastating reality when her son Jack passed away at age 23 after a long fight with heroin addiction.
Jack Higgins passed away from an accidental overdose at age 23
Jack Higgins is one of many victims of accidental overdoses as a result of drug addiction, and is part of a number that is growing at an alarming rate in Hamden and other neighboring towns. However, thanks to his determined mother, Jack will never be confined to a statistic. His memory lives on with every bit of light that is shined on his story, now told through his healing parent. Sue Higgins refuses to hide her truth, because there is no shame to that truth. There is only the possibility to help other parents avoid her tragedy, and be spared the excruciating pain she endures every day.
“Shortly after Jack passed, I was seeing a doctor to help me grieve, the same doctor who Jack used to talk to,” Higgins remembered. “The day after Jack passed, he told me to turn my pain into passion, and turn it into something positive. That really stuck with me.”
Higgins’ passion is centered around a determination to get the word out to Hamden residents about the fatal nature of addiction, and how nobody is immune to its effects, regardless of how much they try to avoid it.
“The challenge is getting people to realize that it can happen to you,” Higgins explained. “But it’s everywhere, and kids are dropping like flies.”
The numbers support Higgins’ statement. Drug overdoses claimed just one Hamden resident from January to June of 2015. It has claimed seven in that window of time in 2017, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The rise of opioid abuse in Connecticut has led many addicts to heroin, a cheaper and more potent drug than what they can find in a prescription bottle. Heroin alone claimed 174 lives in the state of Connecticut in 2016. Based on the numbers so far this year, the projected number of deaths by year’s end is currently 516.
Despite the staggering numbers and reports, Higgins insists there is a deathly silence over Hamden, and a reluctance to spread the word. Why is such a serious and dangerous issue not being addressed more openly?
“People just think it will never happen to them,” Higgins responded.
It happened to Higgins, who faced a crossroads after burying her only son at far too young an age. She wanted no parent to have to feel that pain. So she took her doctor’s advice and decided to do something about it.
Higgins family, left to right. Jack, sister Courtney, Sue and her husband John
Higgins began leading panels and forums throughout Hamden to warn parents and family members of the dangers of addiction, taking meetings into places like Hamden Town Hall and Hamden Middle School. She has met multiple times with Hamden Mayor Curt Leng and Chief of Police Thomas Wydra to help spread the word to kids and their family members. Higgins believes awareness needs to be spread beyond just the suffering addicts.
“It’s a family disease,” Higgins said. “And it can take you down pretty quickly.”
Higgins has gotten to work quickly, picking up the pieces and putting panels together just a year after Jack’s death. Despite her painstaking efforts and honesty, many of her words are falling on deaf ears, or absent ones.
“I personally went and taped informational signs everywhere, and it was on the Facebook page for the town,” Higgins said about a panel she put together at Hamden Middle School. “I would say probably about 75 or 80 people showed up, half of whom were my friends there to support me, the other half were my partner Margerie’s friends. That’s it.”
Despite the disappointing attendance, Higgins organized another panel to speak at Hamden High School shortly after. Once again, she posted signs and sent out notices of the meeting in school progress reports and report cards. There would be a morning session to speak to the kids about the dangers of using, and an evening panel for the parents. Not one parent showed up.
“Getting the attention of other adults has proven to be very challenging,” Higgins said. “Everybody wants to read the paper and see it on the news, but how many people actually want to take the time and listen? I don’t know how else to get people’s attention. In my own experience, people say it’s a disease but don’t understand how easy it is to become addicted.”
Higgins isn’t alone in her fight to open the eyes of the public to what they are reluctant to look at. Hamden resident Maxine Wallace wrote a letter to the editor in the New Haven Register to try and spread the word about Nar-Anon, a private group designed for family members of addicts who are hurting due to the loss of a loved one or the damage caused by a using addict. Like Higgins, Wallace sees a resistance in coming to terms with the true nature of addiction.
“Nobody talks about it,” Wallace said. “It’s such a hidden secret. Nobody knows that your neighbor is going through the same crap that you’re going through. If only people would just talk about it instead of it being a stigma and thinking something is wrong with you.”
Nar-Anon is a private organization that offers help for family members affected by the destruction of addiction
Wallace uses Nar-Anon as a way to help family members achieve the same freedom she experiences in the program. Her husband and brother have both been sober for over a decade, but the freedom she experienced has been through opening up to others and acknowledging her truth. It is a relief that Higgins is able to share through accepting her situation and using it as a vessel to help others, as long as others are open to accepting it.
“I remember when Jack was alive and in school, going into Stop and Shop I wanted to wear a mustache and glasses,” Higgins remembered. “Now I don’t care. There is no stigma. I learned through this experience that every family has something in which they’re a little embarrassed, but some people don’t want to talk about it and others do.”
Higgins can relate to the hesitation for families to open up about their struggles. There has been a stigma of shame wrapped around addiction for years, and getting the conversation started is a difficult task. Higgins empathizes with the fear and embarrassment, but has broken through her own fearful restraints for the greater good.
“I am very open and honest about it,” Higgins said of her grieving journey. “It’s a disservice to Jack to lie about it.”
The strength of Higgins to use the most painful experience of her life for the benefit of others has captivated those around her, particularly those who watch her work tirelessly to do her part to end addiction in Hamden.
“She is a powerful vehicle to the message,” said Ana Gopoian, who is over two decades into sobriety herself and has spoken on two different panels with Higgins. “She lost Jack, and to keep his memory alive, you have to give it a purpose. He didn’t pass in vain.”
The duo of Higgins and Gopoian present multiple perspectives on the effects of addiction, from the pain of family members watching their loved one self-destruct to the addict themselves who can’t stop using, despite the best of intentions. Gopoian believes their struggle can help others avoid their own in the future.
“Experience is where we can change the stigma of addiction,” Gopoian said. “People with these experiences help create smarter people.”
Gopoian has joined Higgins on panels around Hamden, including their appearance at Hopkins school, while Higgins has joined Gopoian on her own program, “The Paraphernalia Project.” The movement is Gopoian’s effort to alert parents and family members of signs to look out for that may tip them off to drug use by their kids.
“The project is meant for adults, teachers and officers,” Gopoian explained. “When parents are knowledgeable of red flags, they can intervene.”
Higgins was eager to jump on board with Gopoian’s project, and echoes her statement on the importance of family knowledge.
“Parents need to be aware of the signs and red flags,” Higgins added. “They need to know what tiny pupils are, and things that are so obvious but you don’t want to see them.”
Hamden, Connecticut and cities throughout the United States are in the midst of a deadly epidemic when it comes to heroin and opioids, and concerned citizens like Higgins are fighting hard to make others aware of the warning signs of drug use before it’s too late. An added danger with heroin use has been the recent introduction of fentanyl, a powerful opioid that is normally used in a patch to apply to the body to manage pain. However, heroin is now being laced with fentanyl for added potency, and leading to deadly results.
According to the Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner, there was one overdose death in Connecticut in 2012 in which heroin and fentanyl was in the victim’s system. Given the current pace of related deaths this year, 2017 is projected to end with 354 deaths within Connecticut as a result of this lethal mixture.
Many parents who have lost children to overdoses due to laced heroin have been calling for heavier sentences for the dealers who distribute those drugs. Higgins wasn’t pleased with the outcome of the case that involved the loss of her son, but other factors interfered with Jack’s dealer getting a harsher sentence.
“The kid who sold the drugs to my son got 18 months in jail,” Higgins says. “Is that enough? No, but in this case my son had other drugs in his system and it couldn’t be proven which one killed him.”
It was reported that Jack Higgins had heroin, cocaine and Xanax (or alprazolam) in his system on the day of his untimely death. It’s hard to prove the other drugs were mixed in with whatever heroin he purchased, so his dealer was sentenced to a time in jail that seemed to be more of a slap in the wrist than a punishment fitting of the crime, according to Higgins.
“I feel like whoever is dealing drugs needs to have maybe a mandatory sentence,” Higgins said. “It’s too light. There was just something in the paper yesterday about a couple dealers in Hamden who were out on a $10,000 and $20,000 bond. Any drug dealer worth their weight in salt is going to have that much money under their bed.”
Helping Higgins through the court proceedings after Jack’s death was Ines Cenatiempo, victim-witness coordinator for the Connecticut Department of Justice. Cenatiempo has worked with countless families looking for justice in the past, but the Higgins family had a lasting impact on her.
“Ms. Higgins and her husband were wonderful to work with,” Cenatiempo said. “I wish I did not have to meet them under such tragic circumstances, but despite the loss of their son, they were both passionate about being involved in outreach and awareness concerning the opioid crisis. I admire them for the courage it takes to keep going, and to speak out about this epidemic.”
Cenatiempo runs panels of her own which seek to shine a light on the horrors that addiction wreaks on families, and has hosted one in Hamden. She asked Higgins to speak for her group, but it came at a time that Higgins was not ready to speak about her tragedy in public. Cenatiempo hosts such panels not just because it is part of her job description, but she also is a primary witness to the alarming trend that is happening around her.
“I have worked on almost every overdose case our office has prosecuted, which is over 100 cases,” Cenatiempo said. “The past two years have seen a dramatic increase in these types of cases.”
As the fatalities continue to rise, the battle in Hamden rages on for Higgins. Despite a lack of attendance at her previous panels, she still continues to hold these types of meetings . As she struggles to find a niche that will attract parents to learn about this fatal issue, she continues to work to give herself a sense of helpful purpose.
“I just don’t want it to be my identity,” Higgins says. “I don’t want to be seen as that woman who lost her son. I want to be the woman that lost her son and is fighting really hard to raise awareness and wake people up.”
Painting of Jack Higgins, which is displayed in the Higgins household to keep his memory alive
Jack’s memory is everywhere in the Higgins household. His friends still come to visit regularly and check on the family. His pictures are littered about the house, bringing a warm smile to Higgins’ face every time she walks by. She remembers the good times with her son, but is also reminded of his painful truth. She stumbled across 10 bags of heroin while retrieving something from Jack’s room just weeks ago, now almost a year and a half since his passing. The reminders are not a reason to be ashamed. For Higgins, it is a reason to emerge from the shadows of addiction and spread the word so it doesn’t have to devastate another Hamden family.
Every Sunday evening, the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Hamden welcomes roughly 20 to 40 people for a few hours of social time.
One of the familiar faces at the post is Loreen Lawrence. Lawrence, 54, is involved at the post as the quartermaster, or as she calls it, the treasurer of the post. In the waning moments before the post opens on Sunday evening, Lawrence, a life-long New Haven resident, is making final preparations as she sweeps the floor and puts tables together.
Lawrence is a veteran herself as she served in the National Guard medical unit for 18 years, including during Operation Desert Shield and Storm.
She’s also a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder, and she didn’t even know she had it until she was in therapy after she was discharged.
“Even though I had signs and symptoms of someone that had PTSD, I was never treated for it,” Lawrence said, “Though they did note it in my file.”
Lawrence’s mother was the first to notice that something wasn’t right with her and she went to Veteran Affairs to point out there was something wrong. It was there that she found out she had PTSD, making her a part of the 10 percent of Gulf War veterans that suffer from the disorder, according to Medline Plus.
“It came time to where I could use some extra money, so I saw on the board that they had a study going for people who were serving during Desert Storm and people who were activated for Desert Storm and people who were supportive of Desert Storm,” Lawrence said, “After the study, I asked, ‘What part was I in?’ And they said, ‘Oh you’re in the PTSD part.’ I didn’t even know I had PTSD, I didn’t know they had diagnosed me with it. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I just had a different way of doing things.”
Lawrence mentioned the transition period between deployment and regular life as a contributing factor as to why she didn’t realize she had PTSD.
“I was too busy. I had a daughter at the time, I had to go back to work,” Lawrence said, “The type of work I was doing at the time was family support services. So, I was helping women with their children and stuff like that. I didn’t really have the time to focus on me. And then when we come back, it’s back to life as usual. It’s not really a degree thing, to get you ready to go back to regular life.”
Lawrence said the first time she realized she had PTSD was around 1998, which is seven years after Desert Storm. When she was at a camp that summer, something triggered her about her time in service.
“I had to think of what was it that had triggered me to not being able to sleep, to having flashbacks,” Lawrence said.
And then, she remembered.
“So we were going behind the tanks and stuff like that,” Lawrence explained, “When we got to Baghdad, the tanks were flanked and they’re telling us to go before the tanks and I’m like ‘this doesn’t make sense to me.’ So we go down there and you could see the helicopters shooting people in foxholes and stuff and this is like a movie … it was difficult at times.”
Credit: Loreen Lawrence
Two people died and four people were critically injured, Lawrence recalled.
She also said that during this time, there was no space for women to stay in the “VA hospital.” So, she had to go through one-on-one counseling for roughly 10 years before they made beds available to women because of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The stresses of her family services job also became too much, making Lawrence quit her job.
“Some of the issues in the family I felt were unfair and the mother was unable to fix it, so I had to advocate for her,” Lawrence said,“I remember my boss at the time saying ‘Loreen, put the sword down, put the sword down.’ Because I would be angry, fighting mad and that’s where some of the signs of PTSD started going. My boss said, ‘The war is over, you don’t have to fight here.’”
During the first 10 years after she was diagnosed with PTSD, Lawrence remarked on the hardships she faced.
“For about 10 years I was stuck in my room,” Lawrence said, “I was scared to go out and do things, even though I had three children, but the children kind of ran themselves.”
She also remarked that the first few times she did a 90-day recovery program that would expose her to crowds, it was hard for her. She would also have panic attacks on elevators. She was afraid to share her feelings.
Lawrence wants her story to be an example as to why the transition period can be so rough on veterans.
“One day I was in the sand dune and the next day I was in the streets of New Haven,” Lawrence said, “Only you know, nobody knows that you’re coming back from a war. And they treat you like you never left. And you deal with that with the best of your ability. It’s difficult for a lot of veterans.”
Lawrence is now taking her experience and hoping to spread awareness of PTSD in veterans as she is a part of Change Direction, a campaign that helps people recognize the signs of PTSD.
“What I’m doing now is trying to campaign for the 22 veterans that commit suicide daily in the United States,” Lawrence said. “Somebody came out with a campaign called Change Direction and it’s to aide people to see the signs. If a loved one is talking to you and they’re acting a specific way or they’re saying specific things, these are key words or key things for people that are suffering. You need to let them know, you need to get some help.”
Lawrence wants families of those who are serving and veterans to realize the Change Direction’s five signs that someone may have PTSD. Those signs are: personality change, agitation, withdrawal, poor self-care and hopelessness.
“If they need assistance, get them over to the (Veteran Affairs hospital),” Lawrence said, “They have a thing called a vet center, which is a veteran’s readjustment counseling kind of place.”
Lawrence’s ultimate goal is for people to know the five signs so that one person could help save a life and then that person can do the same.
In addition to working on the Change Direction campaign and at the Hamden VFW post, Lawrence is also a post service officer at the Hamden American Legion, where she helps veterans get certain claims to go through.
Even though she’s faced tough times from a result of serving, Lawrence feels that her time in the National Guard was worth it.
“I miss it,” Lawrence said, “Even today, if I could go back, I would.”
Curt Leng can take a breath. After spending Tuesday afternoon wishing for an election score update that doesn’t exist, Leng found out he will remain Hamden’s mayor after beating republican candidate Salman Hamid.
Leng received 74 percent of the votes to earn another term in office. The re-elect is one of several democrats who enjoyed the election results on Tuesday night, as the democratic candidates swept all four major positions up for election, including a town clerk position that was unopposed and claimed by Vera Morrison.
Election Day is underway in Hamden, with polls just hours away from closing at 8 p.m. Hamden could have a new mayor by night’s end, unless democratic representative and current mayor Curt Leng wins today’s election to maintain his position. Leng, who was outside Hamden Public Library this afternoon greeting voters, is feeling confident about his chances to remain town mayor.
“I think we’ve had really good feedback from residents today,” Leng said. “The things they’ve said about the town and what we’re doing are really positive. But you don’t know until the end of the day.”
Leng’s confidence is high, but has noticed a smaller than usual crowd at the polls today.
“You can’t tell what that means until the totals are done,” Leng said.
A possible explanation for Leng is the lack of opposed positions in certain districts in Hamden. There are democratic representatives in every district for this election, but only two districts have republican representatives.
As for the residents who are casting their votes today, their expectations for whoever walks away victorious appear to be fairly straightforward.
“I want the candidate to be a real honest and good person,” Hamden resident Dennis Tucker explained, though he is keeping his vote private. “He’s got to be upstanding and know what he’s talking about. I don’t want a guy who has no idea what politics are all about.”
While residents know what they want in their candidate, the candidates themselves can feel the day’s stress in terms of not knowing.
“I wish they had a scoreboard up and updated it every hour,” Leng said. “Keep everyone’s confidentiality, but let us know how we’re doing. It’s tough because you don’t really know what is happening.”
Democratic voters are feeling confident in their candidate’s chances to repeat as mayor, whether Leng is stressing or not.
“I’m very satisfied with the current administration in Hamden, and they’re in line with my political views,” Hamden resident and democratic voter George Engelhardt said. “That pretty much determined who I was going to vote for.”
Leng and the rest of Hamden will find out the results of today’s election at roughly 9:30 tonight. Leng will be at Mickey’s Restaurant in Hamden after the results are tallied to either celebrate a victory or cope with a loss. The winner will either be Leng or republican candidate Salman Hamid.
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.
Four different local Hamden positions are up for election on Tuesday, Nov. 7, including mayor. Polls will open bright and early at 6 a.m. and will close at 8 p.m.
Here are the candidates voters will find on the ballot and the positions they are running for:
Voters can head to any of the following locations within voting hours on Tuesday to submit their ballot:
This is the general layout of what the ballot will look like once voters go inside a voting booth (of course, candidate names will be different):
Results are expected to be available at roughly 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, according to the Elections and Registrars Department. Results can be seen shortly after they are recorded at the office of the Elections and Registrars Department at 2750 Dixwell Ave. People can also try calling 203-553-7534, though results may take longer to be available by phone.
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.’”
