Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said on Monday that a rain bomb caused severe localized flooding in Fairfield County over the weekend that covered roads and stranded dozens of motorists. The National Weather Service recorded more than 7 inches of rain in Stamford, Darien, and Westport on Sunday, with the most severe impacts in Westport, where downtown businesses flooded and fire crews conducted 13 water rescues.
Connecticut governor attributes severe Fairfield County flooding to intense rainfall event
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said on Monday that a rain bomb caused severe localized flooding in Fairfield County over the weekend that covered roads and stranded dozens of motorists. The National Weather Service recorded more than 7 inches of rain in Stamford, Darien, and Westport on Sunday, with the most severe impacts in Westport, where downtown businesses flooded and fire crews conducted 13 water rescues.
Lamont explained at a press conference at the State Capitol that rain bombs differ from other severe storms in their unpredictability and capacity to quickly overwhelm local infrastructure. He described the phenomenon as rainfall of five, seven, or nine inches falling over a very limited period of time, overwhelming stormwater drainage systems.
Floodwaters covered several lanes of Interstate 95 between exits 18 and 19 on Sunday, according to National Weather Service reports. More than six feet of water was measured in the yard at a state Department of Transportation regional maintenance facility in Westport, and officials said they were evaluating how many vehicles there were damaged and whether they could be repaired.
Additional flooding and water rescues were reported in Bridgeport, Fairfield, and New Haven. In Stratford, 4.25 inches of rain had fallen as of 7:52 p.m. on Sunday according to Sikorsky Memorial weather station data. Some meteorologists labeled Sunday's rainfall a one-in-200-year flood event, a metric determined by the probability that an area will see a certain amount of rainfall in a given time period.
State Emergency Management Director Bill Turner said the threshold to qualify for federal public disaster assistance in Fairfield County is around 5 million dollars, along with 7 million dollars in total statewide damages. State and federal officials were surveying communities to assess whether the damage would qualify for a major disaster declaration. Deputy DOT Commissioner Laoise King said there was no permanent damage reported to any state roads, and that rail operations along Metro-North Railroad and CT Transit lines had returned to normal schedules on Monday.
The flooding was compared by several officials to catastrophic floods that struck the Naugatuck River Valley in 2024, which broke rainfall records and caused an estimated 206 million dollars in damages. On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved more than 350,000 dollars in federal disaster aid to pay for repairs to Darien's Gorham Pond Dam, which was damaged in flooding caused by Hurricane Ida in 2021.
- The source does not state whether any injuries or deaths were ultimately reported.
- The source does not provide a final damage total or specify whether the damage qualified for federal disaster relief funds.
- The source does not identify how many vehicles were damaged at the state Department of Transportation facility in Westport or whether any were determined to be beyond repair.
Read the original at CT Mirror