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September 30, 2024

Wetter weather brings flood of work for some CT contractors

HBJ PHOTO | MICHAEL PUFFER Brown Roofing owner Edward Griffin at a jobsite in Cheshire.
PHOTO | TABIUS MCCOY/CT MIRROR Gov. Ned Lamont and Sen. Richard Blumenthal looking at the aftermath of the flooding in Oxford, following a severe storm in August.
By Michael Puffer

Brown Roofing’s landlord in the Seymour Industrial Park is adding a new 45,000-square-foot warehouse so the company can carry enough roofing shingles, plywood and other materials to keep up with supply chain delays and rising demand.

A growing number of severe storms is at least partially responsible for a boost in business in recent years, says Brown Roofing owner Edward Griffin.

“I definitely agree that storms are becoming more severe, more common,” Griffin said. “Years of work is now accumulating in three months.”

Meteorological experts generally agree that climate change and a warming planet are putting more moisture in the air, which has led to stronger, more intense storms. While that creates great risks and costs for many businesses, often unrecoverable through insurance, it also puts contractors like Brown Roofing in higher demand.

Some contractors, including roofing and basement repair companies, are responding by hiring more staff and moving to larger buildings with greater storage capacity.

Griffin took a summer job with Brown Roofing in 1989, when he was 13. Twenty-three years later, he bought what was a six-person company from founder Gary Brown. Now 49, Griffin employs 54 people and said demand is higher than ever.

“We are holding onto way more inventory than we ever had because of the shortages that happen when you have these severe storms,” Griffin said. “You start to have color shortages, shingle shortages, plywood shortages — all the things we use. Siding is just so backed out.”

Climate costs

In a report released in May, Zurich Insurance warned that flooding, hurricanes, drought, wildfires and other natural disasters exacerbated by climate change are already having a significant economic impact.

Twenty-three percent of the global population is exposed to flood depths greater than 5.9 inches during a 100-year flood, while 700 million people are at risk of being displaced by a drought by 2030, according to the report.

Globally, natural disasters caused $380 billion in economic losses in 2023, with less than one-third of those losses covered by insurance, according to professional services firm Aon.

The Aug. 18 rainstorm that pummeled parts of New Haven, Litchfield and Fairfield counties with up to nearly 16 inches of rain in six- to eight hours caused hundreds-of-millions of dollars in damage to homes, businesses and public infrastructure. According to the state Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, parts of Connecticut experienced once-in-1,000-year flooding.

Three people died. Dozens more were evacuated.

The Metro-North railroad’s Waterbury branch suffered an estimated $13 million in damage, according to Gov. Ned Lamont, who issued a formal request for a federal disaster-relief declaration, which was approved by President Joe Biden. In one Seymour shopping center, 13 of 17 businesses were destroyed or suffered major damage.

As of Sept. 6, more than 155 small businesses had applied for a piece of a $5 million state micro-grant program created to help storm-impacted companies. Almost 2,000 homes were found to have suffered damage from the storm.

Ocean-water evaporation

John Bagioni, a meteorologist operating Fax Alert Weather Service in Burlington, said he’s convinced climate change is making storms more intense, but there isn’t enough data yet to say exactly by how much.

“But there is a general sense in the meteorological community and the climate community that the heavy-to-excessive precipitation events are increasing in frequency, and they are increasing in frequency on a worldwide scale,” Bagioni said. “It looks like we are getting more frequent heavy, localized events,” like Connecticut experienced in August.

A warming planet creates more ocean-water evaporation, which puts more moisture in the atmosphere, Bagioni said.

“The connection we think will be made is that a warming planet and warming oceans means the amount of water available to local storm events is greater,” Bagioni said. “It was rare to get 70-plus dew points in the course of a summer. Now we are getting many of them in a row. That’s leading to more impressive rainfall events, even if it is not for every town.”

Some years will be drier than others, but the long-term trend is for wetter weather, Bagioni said.

More work for cleanup, prevention

Griffin, of Brown Roofing, isn’t the only contractor to experience an uptick in business following more severe storms.

“The standing joke with us is you get the 100-year-storm once a month now,” said Richard Taylor, owner of Connecticut Dry Basements.

Taylor recently paid $1.2 million for a 7,600-square-foot warehouse in Cheshire — a new home for a business he launched 15 years ago in his garage. Taylor is now up to 18 employees after hiring four new workers over the past couple months to handle an increased workload.

Taylor credits his business growth to a solid reputation and increasingly severe weather. However, he isn’t sold on the notion that humans are to blame for changing climate.

“We have customers who say I’ve lived here 20 years and never once had water, and now it’s 6 inches deep,” Taylor said. “It’s definitely getting wetter. The occurrences of heavy rain are more often.”

Enzo Minniti, co-owner of Scenic Landscaping in Rocky Hill, said demand for yard drainage is picking up. He performs up to two dozen drainage jobs a year.

There are many more inquiries than actual jobs, however, as people suffer sticker shock when estimates hit around the $10,000 mark, he noted. That happens so often that Minniti now asks for photographs of a potential jobsite so he can give an initial over-the-phone estimate to determine if a customer is interested in moving forward.

“We’ve gotten a lot more leads,” Minniti said. “Not that we always close a sale, because people have no idea what things cost these days.”

Laura Champagne is the owner of a Suffield-based franchise of mold remediator Natural Home Solutions. Her customers are also complaining about emerging water problems.

Champagne, 41, is a single mother who managed a car dealership for 18 years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Then she decided to make a change and became a franchisee of a company that uses organic, non-toxic products to address mold issues. She hired an employee about 18 months ago. While not in business for a long time, Champagne said her customers often talk of changing conditions.

“Customers will say: ‘I’ve owned this house for 30 years and never had water in the basement,’” Champagne said. “Talking to my customers, there is definitely an increase in problems. I’d say a large portion of our business is from the increase in water. I’d say at least half of it is due to some sort of water-related storm damage.”

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