Vulnerable Connecticut residents, many still without power, hard-hit by Tropical Storm Isaias

There is nothing to stave off the fall of darkness in West Simsbury, where 76-year-old Fina Capodice has been without power for four days. The batteries in her flashlight are dead, and she has no candles. Her refrigerator is out, and she has no running water.

“The first three days I was really ambitious, doing the best I could, but then after that it started to go downhill,” she said Friday.

In the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias, at least 400,000 Connecticut residents remained without power Friday afternoon, half of the roughly 1 million who initially reported outages. Eversource has said that it will take until midnight on Tuesday to restore the vast majority of the state’s power outages. For many residents, particularly the elderly or those with health conditions that require keeping medications refrigerated, Tuesday remains a frighteningly long time away.

Capodice, who lives alone, has family on the Connecticut shoreline in Madison, but they also do not have power, she said. She has enough food for the time being, and her neighbors have helped bring her fresh water. And she has learned how to make her way through her house in the dark if she gets up in the middle of the night.

“This time we just have to wait it out. That’s hard to go until Tuesday. That’s worrying me a little,” Capodice said. “I made it four days, from the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, four full days. Now we’re going to start the second half.”

The widespread power outages have proved particularly devastating for residents who require dialysis machines or insulin injections to live.

Michael Lawson, a 59-year-old programmer from Farmington who requires daily kidney dialysis, lost power at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. He ran an extension cord from an outside portable generator up a flight of stairs to his dialysis machine.

“I just hooked up [to dialysis] now and I seem to be OK,” Lawson said. “I normally do this at night when I’m sleeping, but I want to keep an eye on the generator.”

DJ, a Vernon resident who declined to give his full name, lost power Tuesday afternoon and still had none on Friday. A Type 1 diabetic, he has been trying to keep his insulin cold by making repeated trips to Walmart to buy bags of ice to stock the inside of his fridge.

“I’ll find out if the insulin survived when I start using it and see how my blood sugars react,” he said in a message. “It may kill the efficacy.”

With a power line down right outside his apartment that still has not been cleared and no food left, he has been driving to fast food places to eat, he said. He has slept little over the past few days because it is so humid in his home.

DJ asked Eversource on social media Friday whether the company would pay for his replacement insulin. The company responded that it could not pay for lost food or medication since it “was an act of nature that caused the outages, not anything we caused.”

Some towns have opened up relief centers in schools or senior centers in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the storm. At Middletown High School, the cafeteria was functioning as a cooling center Friday, where people can access electricity, store medications or baby formula in a refrigerator or simply sit in the air conditioning to get relief from the heat.

Michelle Hansen, a public health sanitarian enforcement officer for Middletown, said that only a handful of people had come by to use the space’s resources. The town was hoping that more people would hear about it, she said.

On Friday afternoon, a lone 65-year-old woman sat in the corner of the cafeteria, charging her devices. A Middletown resident who declined to be named, she said that she had no lights, air conditioning or internet at home, and had lost $300 worth of food when her refrigerator kicked out. She said that she was at her “wit’s end.”

In West Simsbury, Capodice is trying to gird herself for another four days of darkness. She has made it through many storms before, but she’s all alone for this one. And though she has received a number of offers to relocate due to the power outage, she is hard-pressed to leave her home of 50 years, she said.

“I try to think of things every day to do to get me started for the day or cheer me up,” she said. “The other morning I was singing nursery songs at 7:30 in the morning. I was singing full blast, and I haven’t done them in a while, so it was exciting.”

Eliza Fawcett can be reached at [email protected].

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