HARTFORD, Conn. — After soaking the state, Tropical Storm Henri has circled back to a waterlogged Connecticut Monday, dropping more rain and prompting worries about additional flooding. A flash flood warning is in effect in Hartford and Tolland counties until 3 p.m.
Once a hurricane, the storm has again been downgraded, this time to a tropical depression, said Gary Lessor, chief meteorologist with Western Connecticut State University’s weather center.
“Now today, it’s going to be heading back east,” he said Monday morning. “So the energy from it is going to move on through.”
More rain coming?
More rain fell Monday, and it was heavy at times. It was pouring in West Hartford at lunchtime, and rain fell heavily in Middlesex, New Haven and Litchfield counties as well.
Why more rain? Isn’t the storm done?
The storm made an abrupt turn and came back to Connecticut. A flood watch remains in effect statewide through late Monday night.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, who was with Gov. Ned Lamont and other public officials in Canterbury, one of the hardest-hit towns, Monday, said: “As much as I think Connecticut is breathing a collective sigh of relief today, let me say that this storm is still circling around parts of the state. It’s sunny here, but it is still raining pretty hard in the western part of the state. There is still a potential for trees to come down and for potentially significant flooding.”
How much did it rain Sunday?
Manchester got from 4.5-5 inches of rain, South Windsor got 4.5 inches and Hebron and Colchester got more than 4 inches, the National Weather Service said Monday. Glastonbury saw 3.98 inches, and 3.87 fell in the Rockville section of Vernon; Lessor said part of Vernon got 4.37 inches. Some of the measurements were taken Monday morning.
Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks had 3.20 inches of rain — a daily record, he said.
Manchester had heavy flood damage; the Lydall Street area and Route 30/83 at the Vernon line were among the flooded spots. Part of at least one road was washed away, and crews did water rescues.
Water “was flowing through the streets of Manchester, so it was pretty intense,” said Lessor, who has a student who lives in the area.
Guests of the Motel 6 on the Vernon-Manchester line were trapped when the nearby Hockanum River overflowed its banks. Some tried to drive away, but their cars became disabled from the rushing waters, said David Owens, spokesman for the town of Vernon.
Firefighters cut a hole in the nearby highway fence and guided guests through it, allowing them to drive up onto I-84 and get to safety, he said.
The heavy rain in East Hartford caused organizers to cancel Monday’s planned East Hartford Mobile Foodshare event at Hockanum Park, where Pewterpot Brook flows. East Hartford got about 3.5 inches of rain.
East Hartford police spokesman Lt. Josh Litwin said the town fared well overall, however.
“The town was well prepared — the [Emergency Operations Center] was open for the duration of the storm and extra staffing was in place for any/all contingencies,” Litwin said. He reported a few brief scattered outages, some minor flooding of the Hockanum River on Upper Burnside near Labor Field, resulting in a temporary road closure there Sunday afternoon. Parts of Prospect Street also flooded. Public works crews removed scattered tree branches and debris in roads.
Did a lot of people lose power?
It wasn’t as bad as it would have been had Henri been a direct hit. Once a hurricane, Henri made landfall in Westerly, Rhode Island, on Sunday and then plowed through Connecticut, hitting the eastern part of the state harder than the west by dropping trees onto electrical wires. Some cars and at least one house were struck by fallen trees as well.
The state had about 30,000 outages at the height of the storm Sunday and by 7:30 a.m. Monday, the number in Eversource’s coverage area was down to about 8,000, with a vast majority in the northeast corner.
Canterbury was one of the hardest-hit towns, where 532 customers, or 23% of the town, still lacked power. In Brooklyn, 688 customers, or 19%, had no electricity, and in Plainfield, 560, about 7.7%, were in the dark. To the south, only 64 United Illuminating customers lacked power at 7:30 a.m., all of them in Derby.
About 95% of customers in Canterbury had no electricity on Sunday, Gov. Ned Lamont said when touring the town late Monday morning. He said Eversource has promised that all will have their power restored by the end of the day.
“We dodged a bullet,” Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said during a news conference in Bristol Monday morning. But the danger isn’t over, she warned.
“We are seeing water levels increasing,” she said. She warned motorists not to drive through standing water and urged people not to swim in fast-moving bodies of water, some of which may be contaminated because of sewage treatment plant overflows.
How are the roads?
Some roads remained closed Monday morning because of downed trees. They include Route 191 in East Windsor, Route 668 in Canterbury and Route 6 in Brooklyn.
Flooding on I-91 in Hartford led to several collisions Sunday, said state Trooper Matthew Cashman. The accidents were cleared, “but as troopers were out there investigating crashes, more and more crashes started happening because of the flooding,” Cashman said. At 3 p.m., state police closed the northbound side of the highway between Exits 25 and 26; it has since reopened.
Four nursing homes on the shoreline — in Old Saybrook, Mystic, Guilford and West Haven — were evacuated, according to Lamont’s chief of staff, Paul Mounds. About 250 residents were relocated to other nursing homes, he said.
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(Hartford Courant staff writers Jesse Leavenworth and Don Stacom contributed to this report.)
