Episode 142: Weathering the Storm

It’s the middle of summer and the weather is great! But, we all must be aware that hurricane season is upon us. Fortunately, the UConn Extension works with colleagues from across the United States as part of the national Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN). The goals of the network are to help residents, communities, businesses, and municipalities in the state to prepare for, mitigate, and recover from extreme weather events. Our guest on the podcast this week is Stacey Stearns, who is a communications specialist for the Extension and works with EDEN. Stacey gives us some prep tips for what we should all do to prepare for hurricanes, whether you own a home, a business, or a farm. The podcasters also remember storms of the past and how to prepare for all kinds of snow and rain. Also back in 2005, do you know what Slate picked as the U.S. city where the odds of perishing in a natural disaster are the smallest?

Listen to Episode 142 on Podbeam

Mike: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Izzy, the summer is moving along at a fast pace. I don’t particularly like it.

Izzy: I know, and it seems like we’re finally getting the good weather now.

Mike: We’re finally getting the good weather, but I had a great aunt who used to say, once the 4th of July came, summer’s over. And I used to laugh at her, and now I think she was right.

Izzy: What? That’s a negative way to think because if we have a good summer, it usually goes into like late September if we have good weather.

Mike: Well, that’s true. But here at UConn we’re pretty busy come mid-July.

Izzy: You make a point. So, grandma was right. Wait, was it grandma?

Mike: Great aunt.

Izzy: Great aunt. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Great aunt.

Mike: So, our guest today, for the second podcast in a row, we have a guest from the great UConn Extension. I said the same thing on the last episode, but I’ll say it again. The UConn Extension, I think, is one of the great front porches of our university. We have things like athletics, we have things like the Dairy Bar, and we have the UConn Extension where people are exposed to the university and served by the university, maybe not in a particular classroom or academic setting.

So, our guest today is Stacey Stearns. She’s a communication specialist for the UConn Extension in the Disaster Education Network. She works with colleagues from around the United States as part of the National Extension Disaster Education Network, EDEN, that’s called. So, the global network is to help residents, communities, businesses, and municipalities in the state and all over the country prepare for extreme weather events. And we have our share of extreme weather events here in Connecticut. She specializes in agricultural communications, agritourism, and crisis and issue communications. She’s the president-elect of the Association for Communication Excellence. She earned her undergraduate degree here at UConn and has a master’s degree from the University of Florida. So, Stacey, welcome to the UConn 360 Podcast.

Stacey: Thanks, Mike and Izzy, it’s great to be here.

Mike: So, tell us, give us a general overview of the Disaster Education Network, what you do on a national basis, but what you do particularly here for the people in Connecticut.

Stacey: Yeah, so EDEN is a national network, and Connecticut has our own group, and basically what we do is our UConn Extension professionals work together to develop resources and programs to help various communities, individuals, businesses, and farmers, agriculture, prepare for, mitigate for, and then recover from storms.

So that can be anything from the extreme heat that we’ve had these past few weeks, it’s a typical New England summer, to the flooding that was happening on farms a couple years ago, last year, and in the previous years, to drought and flooding on our coastal communities, power outages from hurricanes. It’s all different types of extreme weather events. You’ve probably heard it before, that if you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes and it will change. And that’s what EDEN’s here for. We’re here to help you manage those changes and the different things that come along. So, we’ve got great resources.

And then as part of the national network, we can leverage the resources from other states. So, a few years ago, Louisiana had a hurricane. A couple weeks later we’re having a hurricane. And my colleagues from LSU Ag Center emailed me and said, hey, you’ve got a hurricane coming. We just dealt with it. Here’s everything we gave to our audiences. And then we were able to take what we didn’t have, where we didn’t have expertise, and augment our resources with their resources to better serve the residents of Connecticut.

Izzy: I like that quote about, wait five minutes and you’ll never know what could happen in New England. It’s so true. Like it could be 90 degrees at 2:00 PM and then the next day at 2:00 PM you could have like 40-degree weather. You just never know what you’re going to get here.

Stacey: It’s very true.

Izzy: And speaking of which, with hurricanes, that’s not something that we normally get a ton of, but according to NOAA, it’s supposed to be an above-normal season for hurricanes. What does that mean for residents and businesses in Connecticut? Is it too early to start preparing? And if you even want to expand beyond Connecticut, I know you shared your experience with LSU, you said…

Stacey: Yes.

Izzy: With some of those resources and preparation that they used. How does that all come into consideration in Connecticut?

Stacey: Well, one of the things we like to say in EDEN is that it’s never too early to prepare. So, we are always encouraging people to get ready. There are some really easy things that people can do to get ready, whether it’s for an individual, your home, family, your house, whether it’s a business, whether it’s a farm.

So, we have different resources on the website, including checklists. You can prepare for a storm, you can make an emergency kit, or what people call a go-bag. So, in our coastal communities where they sometimes need to evacuate as the flooding comes up over their roads and cuts off houses in residential areas, a go-bag is more important.

If it’s somebody like me that lives here in Mansfield, I might just want to make sure that my generator’s ready, that I’ve got a water supply, and that tree limbs that are perhaps dead are trimmed. So those are some things that we do. We also have home inventory checklists. For insurance purposes, if something happens, your insurance company is going to want to know what you actually had and what its value was.

So, there are resources to help you make that inventory that you can share with your insurance agent. And then we also have resources for farmers dealing with wind loads on barns, falling limbs, crop damage. So, any of that stuff can help prepare ahead of time.

Mike: So also growing up here in Connecticut, I always heard stories about the 1938 hurricane, which I guess was, if not the worst, one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit Connecticut.

Izzy: Mike, you were alive then, right?

Mike: I was not alive.

Izzy: I’m just kidding.

Mike: It’s not funny.

Izzy: Sorry. Sorry. Bad joke.

Mike: That’s okay. No, no, no. I’ve seen pictures of it, as maybe we all have, but it seems like a lot of things in the last, you know, 80, 90, 100 years, those people in 1938 had either little or no time to prepare for the hurricane. Is that pretty accurate?

Stacey: So, I wasn’t alive for it either.

Mike: Yeah.

Stacey: But I’ve heard similar things to what you’re saying. Yeah, they had very little warning what was coming or how bad it would be.

Mike: Yeah. So, preparation and technology has really helped in terms of hurricanes because it seemed like they had little to no warning time and there was a lot of destruction, especially on the shoreline in that hurricane.

Stacey: It’s very true.

Stacey: Yes.

Izzy: With some of those resources and preparation that they used. How does that all come into consideration in Connecticut?

Mike: So also growing up here in Connecticut, I always heard stories about the 1938 hurricane, which I guess was, if not the worst, one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit Connecticut.

Izzy: Mike, you were alive then, right?

Mike: I was not alive.

Izzy: I’m just kidding.

Mike: It’s not funny.

Izzy: Sorry. Sorry. Bad joke.

Stacey: So, I wasn’t alive for it either.

Mike: Yeah.

Stacey: But I’ve heard similar things to what you’re saying. Yeah, they had very little warning what was coming or how bad it would be.

Izzy: I remember two major storm events that kind of have stuck with me throughout my childhood. One was Nemo when we got a ton of snow, like three feet of snow, and all I remember is just crawling through snow caves in the yard that my dad made trying to clear our massive driveway. And then I think it was a couple months later that Hurricane Sandy hit. And I could be wrong on that, I’m not sure if it was the same year, but talking about the coastal communities, New London was so incredibly damaged and flooded and the beach that I grew up going to, just the seawall was all destroyed. You couldn’t get through to the streets. But the advice about generators and things like that is always good to keep in mind.

Stacey: Yeah. That was 2011 that you’re referring to. August, we had Hurricane Irene and then October, Superstorm Sandy. And then I don’t remember snow that year. I think I was so over the weather at that point, but we did have a bad snow year that year too, I believe. And yeah, that really caught a lot of people off guard. And then one right on top of each other. So yeah, preparation, mitigation, recovery, they are all important parts of it.

Izzy: I almost missed three weeks of school that year, and I just remember I was like, yay, like a snow day, a hurricane day, like what’s next?

Stacey: Until June?

Izzy: Yep.

Mike: So, in 1985, there was Hurricane Gloria, which actually hit the UConn area pretty hard. I was a freshman then, living…

Izzy: You were alive for that?

Mike: I was alive. Yeah, no, I was a freshman living in Shakespeare Hall at UConn. And we were all pretty excited because back then school was never canceled at UConn.

Izzy: Interesting.

Mike: But we actually got the hurricane day off and right in front of Mirror Lake, a big tree went down, and the Yale-UConn football game was canceled because of Hurricane Gloria. So, hurricanes definitely play a big part of our life, especially in the late summer and fall here in Connecticut. But besides hurricanes, what else does EDEN help Connecticut residents prepare for?

Stacey: Yeah, so we’ve got a lot of different resources. Actually, we’ve got a new one coming for farmers, which, you know, we’re recording this during a massive heat wave, so it’s not something we’re necessarily thinking about this week. But we had a lot of flooding last year and it really hampered farms and damaged a lot of crops or made them completely unusable. So, we’ve got a new “Managing Flood Risk on Farms” fact sheet coming out. It’ll probably be out by the time this episode airs, and it’ll be on our EDEN website.

We’ve got another resource for farmers that’s coming out with different checklists based on the season for extreme weather events and what farmers should be prepared for in each of those seasons to help them prepare. As far as individuals go, we’ve got this great resource. I’m sure you guys have talked to them before, our listeners know about them, but the Korey Stringer Institute does some incredible work on heat. And heat is something that really affects all of our audiences, whether they’re residents or farmers, so we work with them some. And then we have other resources just on dealing with heat stress.

On the flip side of all of this, we’ve got drought. So, we’ve got drought resources, power outages. We have a lot of tree cover in Connecticut. It’s fantastic. I love the trees. About 55 percent of the state is covered with trees, but that also means we get a lot of tree damage. So, we have resources for that. And the power outages, food safety that goes along with it too.

Mike: We’re pretty high in tree coverage as a state, right? Compared to other states, which you might think like places like North Dakota and Wyoming and Colorado are high in tree cover, but Connecticut’s actually one of the higher tree cover states in the country, I think.

Stacey: I think you’re right. I don’t know where we rank, but I have heard that as well.

Izzy: Maybe because we’re a smaller state so it feels like more trees, less land.

Mike: That’s true.

Izzy: Whereas compared to Colorado, that’s… but who knows, that’s not my field of expertise anyway. And neither is this. So, I’m glad you’re here today because I’m already learning a lot.

So, we kind of touched upon this a couple of questions ago, but what kind of problems are unique to the coastal communities in Connecticut? Because I feel like they always get hit a little bit harder when it comes to things like hurricanes and maybe not so many snowstorms, but definitely rain and all of that.

Stacey: Yeah, so we are really fortunate to have our coastal communities in Long Island Sound, and it’s beautiful down there. However, when these big storms come in, they get storm surge, they get flooded on the roads we talked about. They’ve got the erosion problems. So, there’s different things that happen depending on where in the coast you are.

There’s saltwater filtration. And there, you talked to Dr. Mike Dietz recently, and he was probably talking a little bit about well water testing. So, what they’re going to face down there is they’re going to have problems coming down the rivers to the coast, but then they’re also going to have the saltwater coming in towards their wells, towards their homes.

So, we have resources from our Connecticut Sea Grant Extension Program, as well as our UConn Center for Land Use Education and Research, or our UConn CLEAR program, about climate resilience, adaptation, municipal decision-making tools. They do community workshops to help them, the living shorelines, natural resilience, just working with nature, working with Long Island Sound and the ocean, and helping to kind of mitigate, again, recover and prevent any incidences.

Mike: So, this again, kind of a topic we covered earlier, but for farmers, they obviously have a very different lifestyle than regular people, a regular homeowner. This has to affect all this weather in different ways and more severe ways and more important ways. How closely do you work with the farming community in Connecticut?

Stacey: So, UConn Extension works really closely with the farming community. We have an agriculture team. It’s one of our core mission areas to support agriculture in the state. And the farming community is really weather dependent. And so, whatever’s going on outside, they’re just rolling with it and trying to manage it as best they can.

So, we have to. Our agriculture team has people that work with fruit and vegetable farmers. We’ve got greenhouse and nursery production. We’ve got aquaculture, dairy, equine, and all of these different people work individually with their different agricultural sectors, and they also work collaboratively. For example, on that checklist by season I was talking about, there’s a lot of different people providing input because each of the farms or the types of farms has their own unique needs, risks, and inputs.

So, we’re working with them, trying to mitigate their risks, trying to build more resilient farms that can withstand these extreme weather events. It’s New England, so something’s going to happen and they’re just going to need to adapt to it and continue farming. And that’s important for all of us as residents because it’s part of our food security. When we have local food from farms, we’re not getting food shipped in from across the country, from different parts of the country, so we’re not as affected by whatever they might have for weather patterns as well.

And it’s also part of our landscape and what we enjoy about living here in Connecticut is driving past these rural communities and the big open farmland, the forests, it’s all part of what makes our state special.

Izzy: I have a lot of friends that have moved to Connecticut from other areas and they’re like, oh, Connecticut is the worst and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, you know what? Compare it to some other states. Between hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme snow, we have it pretty good here, I think.

Stacey: Connecticut is a really good place to live, and I think people give it a hard time, but that is not a deserved reputation. And again, I don’t know all the research, it’s not my area, but when you look at those lists, we always rank as one of the safest places to live. So yeah, we might have some hurricanes coming and we might get some extreme rainfall, but it’s a lot better than it could be in other places.

Izzy: Yeah. My cousin moved to LA and in his first year of living there, extreme wildfires. He’s like, I never would have known this is what I was coming into. But anyways. Speaking of agriculture, you grew up in a very famous family of agriculture in Storrs. Can you share a little bit more about that?

Stacey: Yeah, so as you guys mentioned, my name’s Stacey Stearns and so I’m part of the Stearns family. We are five miles off of campus here. The family farm is Mountain Dairy. So, the Stearns came to Mansfield in 1772. And we originally had a diversified livestock farm. In 1871, we started focusing on milk specifically, and we’ve been delivering milk and producing milk since then.

So, we are right down the road from campus with about 500 milking cows, and it’s just a really great way to grow up. I have firsthand knowledge and experience with the extreme weather of Connecticut because we’re out in it no matter what’s going on. My brother’s out baling hay today.

Izzy: That’s got to be unpleasant when it rains.

Stacey: Oh yeah. He’ll be fine. When it rains, you know, people are gonna be out there working in it. So, it’s just something, it’s a way of life and it’s something we really enjoy.

Mike: Does your family farm still deliver milk?

Stacey: Yes. So, we have home delivery. We started it again during the pandemic and it has continued post-pandemic. With more people teleworking or working from home at least part of the week, it works out for them.

Mike: But that’s a real throwback.

Stacey: It is a throwback. Yeah, the milkman came back.

Mike: The milkman came back. So, I wanted to touch on something we were just talking about before, Stacey’s great tradition of agriculture in her family. There was a survey 10 years ago or so, and I’ll try to find the link for it. The city in the country where you were least likely to die of a natural disaster. Guess what it was?

Izzy: Storrs, Connecticut. Storrs, Connecticut is the lead.

Stacey: I do. Do you remember seeing that?

Mike: I do. Because we sent it to my sister and brother-in-law because he’s a professor at Penn State and we were like, hey, you should come back.

Mike: Yeah, and I guess it kind of makes sense. I mean, we don’t really have tornadoes, not like the Midwest. We get hurricanes but based on preparation and the good work that Stacey and her folks do, we kind of know in advance. Lord knows the TV stations tell us if the hurricanes are coming. So, there you go. You should feel safe being here, Izzy.

Izzy: I do feel safe for the most part, but I have a question for you, and I am wondering, what is the most crazy or memorable storm that you’ve had to help prepare and distribute resources for?

Stacey: Oh, that’s a really good question. So, I’ll do a two-part answer. The first crazy memorable storm was that Superstorm Sandy in October because I was riding my horse in New Jersey and came back to downed power lines. So, it was like, you can’t get there from here to get home. Note to self, try not to travel when said weather experts are saying a big storm is coming.

But you know, years later, it makes a really good story and we’re like, oh, that wasn’t so bad, we did this, and we survived. But I don’t recommend it. At the time, I’m sure my horse was like, she’s crazy.

And then the biggest storm that we’ve had to help with from an Extension standpoint, there’s just so many things and it really depends on what the storm was and which agriculture sector it was affecting. So last year, the flooding was top of mind because it was last year, and the fruit and vegetable farms were just devastated in the central part of the state.

Two years ago, it was the late spring frost that devastated fruit farms, and we were like, there’s no Connecticut peaches. Well, that’s because we had a frost in May and that kind of did them in. And then there’s our aquaculture team that’s working down in Long Island Sound with all of the boats. I was down there a couple weeks ago at Avery Point with Mike Gilman from our team and just talking about the different things that affect the shell fishermen. Some days they go out on the water, and they get halfway out of the harbor, and they turn around and come back in.

So, I think if you talk to each of our Extension professionals, they’ll all have a different thing that stands out in their mind as, this is the one that really hit my sector of agriculture and really made a difference. This is when I could make a difference and help them.

Mike: I love a good peach.

Izzy: That’s what you took from that whole answer?

Mike: I love a good peach. No, I just, I love a good peach.

Izzy: You know what’s really good is the peach ice cream from the Dairy Bar.

Stacey: That is spectacular.

Izzy: Yeah, it’s so good. We actually interviewed the Dairy Bar manager a couple of weeks ago.

Mike: Oh yeah, he was awesome. He brought us ice cream.

Izzy: He did.

Stacey: Oh, we have to up our podcast game.

Izzy: I was gonna say, Stacey, like, where’s the milk?

Mike: Or Stacey’s gonna bring us a hurricane.

Stacey: I hope not.

Mike: I hope not either.

Izzy: But definitely try the peach ice cream.

Mike: Peach ice cream. Yeah, yeah.

Mike: Well, Stacey, thanks for joining us today. And tell us before we wrap up here, for people listening, what’s the best way for people to find out about EDEN, the work you do, what they need to do to prepare for a hurricane, thunder and lightning storm. It’ll be snow season somehow before you know it. What’s the best way for people to stay in touch and learn about you people?

Stacey: Well, you know, I saw a meme on Facebook this week that said next week’s forecast is snow. So, it was for all the people complaining about the heat this week, that the weather is going to change.

But if they visit eden.uconn.edu, all of our resources are broken up by category: agriculture, community, family, and home. And then if they go to the About page, they can contact any of our team members. Everybody’s listed there with their specialty. So, whatever their specific need is, they can find one of our team members who can help them.

Mike: Well, thanks for all the work you do on behalf of UConn. You really make a difference for the people in Connecticut, and again, you really get the UConn name out there. So, thanks for joining us today on the podcast.

Izzy: Thank you, Mike and Izzy.

Mike: Izzy, see you next time.

Izzy: See you next time.