By State › Connecticut

Connecticut: Overview

Download all of Connecticut as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Connecticut exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Connecticut go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 1938 Hurricane: catastrophic, and almost entirely unforecast

Before modern hurricane forecasting existed, a major hurricane struck southern New England on September 21, 1938, with almost no advance warning. It killed an estimated 564-682 people across the region, and the Connecticut River crested at 35.4 feet in Hartford, nearly 20 feet above flood stage. Property losses reached $306 million in 1938 dollars, roughly $4.7 billion today. See the Risks page for the full data.

Tropical Storm Isaias: the modern grid vulnerability

More than 80 years later, a far weaker storm exposed a different kind of vulnerability. Tropical Storm Isaias struck Connecticut on August 4, 2020, with winds around 70 mph, nowhere near hurricane strength, but still knocked out power to more than 757,700 customers at its peak, one of the largest outage events in the state’s modern history. The comparison matters: Connecticut’s power grid can be brought to its knees by a storm far weaker than the one that devastated the region in 1938.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Connecticut: households need real hurricane and coastal flood planning for the kind of storm the region can clearly still experience, and this manual’s backup power guidance carries extra weight here specifically, Connecticut’s grid has proven vulnerable to storms considerably weaker than a hurricane.

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