CT Rain

I was out on the Sound Sunday and saw the damage from the water. The most impressive damage was just west of you over the Thimbles where there were a number of snapped flag poles, snapped/uprooted trees, etc. Lots of debris in the water including flipped over docks, limbs, etc. What a mess. Glad you're OK.

I drove around Branford yesterday and the damage is remarkable. Widespread 80-100 mph gusts with snapped stands of hardwood trees, some structural damage, etc. Have to imagine it's the worst damage in town since at least Hurricane Gloria. What struck me overall was the pretty much continuous damage path from Bethany to Hamden to North Haven and then North Branford/Foxon/Branford. One of the most impressive swaths of widespread damage I can recall outside of a significant tornado in New England.

It was in time for Branford but definitely late for Bethany and Hamden.

Here's our coverage as the storms moved into the New Haven area. Pretty impressive live shots from Hamden and New Haven in there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yow0-a_YDe0

Yeah, looks like straight line wind damage to me. Radar matched what I saw on the ground very well... narrow path that reached max strength over North Haven followed by the circulation occluding and a hellacious RFD surge southeast of there. I don't really like the NWS classification of microbursts... this was just a really wide swath of RFD damage.

I wrote about the storm in my blog if anyone's interested. https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/weather-news/on-ryans-radar/august-27-tornado-event/2325826/

Looks like it was a meteotsunami in Long Island Sound.

We mentioned Leete's Island and Stony Creek a few times on air this afternoon - was a wild looking storm down that way.

Well that was quite a day

Seems like the convection between ALB and BGM is going to help at least temporarily keep the warm front south as it moves toward CT.

Yeah, that's not great.

Meanwhile, here in reality, Chris's point is very good. Doesn't look like a widespread event but rather a real nasty cluster of storms near and along the warm front. Too far south is capped and too far north is wedged.

And good effective shear too.

Drizzle in Tolland? Roofs off in Southington?

There is the potential for some elevated convection NE of the front - watch for some hailers.

Yeah I think we're pretty in tune with what is going to turn into a CT power disaster and what won't. This storm did present some challenges for me - especially because we had the tornado event on Sunday so I was pretty deep into that most of the day, With respect to Isaias though the forecast did get more severe as we got closer. On Sunday I was thinking gusts around 50 or so but it didn't look like a major wind producer to me (in fact the 11p advisory from NHC on Sunday cut the intensity down quite a bit here and dropped the odds of TS force winds substantially). By Monday AM I knew were were in trouble with all the models converging on a solution with a tight/in tact core with a ripping LLJ and the models all showing an unusually large amount of mixing. I bumped up the wind forecast big time with 50-70 mph and went from "scattered tree/power issues" to "widespread". I do think that came a little later than I would have liked it to.

Lots of people have said it's not enough.

The underforecast resulted in probably 1-2 lost days of restoration. The years of neglect to the grid is probably a bigger issue in the grand scheme of things.

When you look at pictures from 1938 and the storms in the 50s and Donna it's amazing how few trees there are compared to now. We've let trees grow unchecked through our electrical grid. There's a price for that. The complete shut down in the tropics for us from 1991-2011 didn't help either as we grew accustomed to few wind storms.

That number includes UI - which was hit very hard being in the remnant eyewall. And yeah there were some epic inland gusts from Gloria.

Not a huge population difference as we have not grown that fast. More trees, fewer line crews, less maintenance, etc.

Yeah they definitely underestimated the storm. I think part of that is the forecast changing - over the weekend it didn't look nearly as bad to me as it did by Monday AM. The other issue is preparing for a reasonable worst case scenario... they were very clear they do not do that because it costs money. So this is a result. I also find it very hard to believe that this storm produced 1M peak outages while Hurricane Gloria produced 500k peak outages. Something is fundamentally broken with the power grid in that case.

It's pretty crazy. Maybe they were able to get things on faster this time with some of the smart grid tech they claim makes a difference? Still seemed like nothing changed with pre-staging, communicating with towns, poor tree maintenance, etc.

When we were under the tornado warning our peak gusts came from that convection. 50-55 knots easy here. Reminded me a lot of the epic southeaster a few years back just before Halloween.

Well that was wild. Bigger winds here than with Irene or Sandy. Tons of damage throughout town.