An extremely wet and dangerously windy Sunday in Connecticut could turn into a hot and powerless week for hundreds of thousands of electric customers, as Tropical Storm Henri is expected to make a direct hit.
Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center recategorized Henri as a tropical storm, with top winds of 70 mph. No hurricane has made landfall in Connecticut since Hurricane Gloria in 1985.
Gov. Ned Lamont is asking residents to shelter in place on Sunday (with the exception of those who are under mandatory evacuations): "Plan for power outages that could last for an extended period. Be prepared for urban and coastal flooding, particularly if you live in a designated flood zone."
Importantly, the entire Connecticut coastline is under a Storm Surge Warning, which should strike beachside homeowners with painful memories of 2012's Superstorm Sandy. A storm surge of 3-to-5 feet is predicted.
Several coastal communities have issued mandatory evacuations for areas that are subject to flooding, including the following:
Evacuations are advised, but voluntary, in parts of New Haven and West Haven.
The station's primary electric utility, Eversource, is predicting outages comparable to last year's Tropical Storm Isaias, when it had as many as 632,000 customers in the dark at the same time.
For Henri, Eversource is not underselling the potential for outages, saying more than half of its 1.3 million customers could lose power for 8-to-21 days. Customers skewered the company last year for outages that lasted more than a week. United Illuminating also says half of its 340,000 customers could be without electricity.
Eversource has said it's improved its communications capabilities since last year. Now, it says crews are "pouring" into the state for Henri.
"This is a massive effort," says Eversource President & CEO Joe Nolan.
Late Saturday night, Gov. Lamont issued an I-95 ban for all empty tractor trailers, tandem tractor trailers, and motorcycles, effective at 11am Sunday.