When was CT last hit by a hurricane? You might be surprised.
Bob came close. Irene and Sandy came closer. But not since Hurricane Gloria in 1985 has Connecticut experienced a direct hit from a fully fledged hurricane.
Recent predictions suggest a busy hurricane season this year, but Connecticut has largely been spared over the decades, with some notable exceptions.
Since 1851, at least eight hurricanes have passed directly over Connecticut, according to the compiled data by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many of them happened over 100 years ago and are unnamed.
Hurricane Gloria arrived on Sept. 27, 1985, making landfall around 6 p.m. that Friday as a category 1 hurricane, which means wind speeds were anywhere from 74 to 95 miles per hour (category 5 is the strongest type of hurricane, with wind speeds over 157 mph). By 9 p.m. that night, the storm weakened to a tropical storm as it went north, leaving destruction in its wake.
Those eight hurricanes don’t include other significant storms that affected Connecticut.
Tropical storms, which are less intense than hurricanes based on wind speed (between 39 and 73 mph) but can still be deadly, have directly crossed over the state 18 times, not including those eight that were hurricanes while over Connecticut.
The most recent one, known as Hurricane Henri before it weakened, crossed over the state in 2021 but not as a hurricane. For up to 12 hours before it hit Connecticut, Henri was a category 1 hurricane, its rain bands bringing downpours along the East Coast. The storm eventually weakened, hitting Connecticut as a tropical storm and then downgrading to a tropical depression, causing power outages, floods and downed trees.
Hurricane Irene, too, passed over Connecticut as a tropical storm in 2011, but destroyed homes and resulted in deaths. In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy — by then no longer a hurricane but still massive — raked the Connecticut shoreline before making landfall in New Jersey.
The center of 1991’s Hurricane Bob didn’t directly cross over the state, but the storm still caused six deaths in Connecticut and economic damage. A satellite image, below, shows Bob centered south of Rhode Island, but its rainbands extending all over New England.
José Luis Martínez is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror.