NHFD Rescues 16 People In Weekend Floods

By Dereen Shirnekhi, New Haven Independent

NEW HAVEN, CT — When a CTtransit bus became stuck in a flooded Temple Street on Sunday, the New Haven Fire Department came to the rescue — by giving the driver a piggyback ride through high waters.

According to NHFD Chief Daniel Coughlin, the fire department rescued five people from that bus, and a total of 16 people from across the city, after torrential rain brought flash floods to New Haven.

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn told the Independent that Sunday’s rain impacted all parts of the city, with the amount of rain ranging from three inches to four-and-a-half inches in three hours, making it a 20- to 100-year rain event. “That was a very large rainstorm,” he said.

The fire department got to work rescuing people stranded in the floodwaters.

“No matter how many times we tell them,” Coughlin said, people still drive through flooded roadways.

The fire department, he said, responded to nine different incidents of flooding across the city, including the Tweed New Haven Airport parking lot and Humphrey and James streets, and near the dump on Middletown Avenue, the post office on Brewery Street, and 1215 Quinnipiac Ave.

All that flash flooding took place in the span of around three hours, Coughlin said. “It’s really pedal to the metal.”

In flash floods, the fire department is equipped with small inflatable boats, floatation devices, and more to handle different kinds of water conditions, including swift water and fast-moving currents. “We’re what they call an ‘all hazards’ department,” Coughlin said. “There’s really nothing the New Haven Fire Department can’t handle.”

Sometimes, Coughlin said, the work is “pure muscle” — like in the case of the bus. Firefighters carried all five people out of the stalled bus and to the nearest dry area, which Coughlin estimated was around 15 feet away.

Firefighters have a variety of wet suits to protect them in cold water and floods, and that’s what Coughlin said they were wearing on Sunday.

The NHFD also rescued three people from cars around the bus.

Coughlin noted that, while firefighters have always had to rescue people from floods, “it seems to me that we’re getting more concentrated heavy rain situations,” he said. Rather than storms that are drawn out over the course of a day, he said, these flash floods occur within hours of downpour.

During these weather events, Zinn’s department gets to work documenting flooding to better inform future modeling and assumptions for the city.

“This is why climate change is such an important topic,” he said. “We’re starting to see more of these events and it’s very serious.”

This, Zinn said, is why the city is spending money and resources to better address and mitigate flooding in problematic, low-lying areas. He called for more support at the federal level for that work.

“Each site has its own very specific characteristics that we have to work through and try to mitigate,” he said. “It’s a moving target.”

The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.