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Crews from John Giunta General Contractor remove guardrails from a damaged bridge on Jesup Road, at the intersection with Imperial Avenue, in Westport on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026. Owner Marcel Bolduc said his crew noticed the damaged concrete and stone seawall under the bridge that had moved a few feet as water rushed through Deadman Brook. "This isn't going to be an easy fix," he said. Credit: Sarah Gordon / CT Mirror

Gov. Ned Lamont said on Monday that a “rain bomb” was to blame for severe localized flooding in parts of Fairfield County over the weekend that covered roads and stranded dozens of motorists.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths from the storm, but officials said they were in the process of tallying damages to determine whether the costs would qualify for federal disaster relief funds.

During a press conference at the State Capitol Monday, flanked by emergency management and transportation officials, Lamont explained that rain bombs differ from other severe storms in their unpredictability and ability to quickly overwhelm local infrastructure.

“It’s how sudden the intense rainfall is — five, seven, nine inches in a very limited period of time. That’s what causes severe flooding that overwhelms our stormwater drainage systems,” Lamont said. “And you saw that yesterday, especially down in Fairfield County.”

More than 7 inches of rain fell Sunday in Stamford, Darien and Westport, according to data collected by the National Weather Service.

The most severe impacts were felt in Westport, where several downtown businesses were flooded and local fire crews conducted 13 water rescues. Floodwaters also covered several lanes of Interstate-95 between exits and 18 and 19 on Sunday, according to NWS reports.

More than six feet of water was measured in the yard at a state Department of Transportation regional maintenance facility in Westport, according to Deputy DOT Commissioner Laoise King. Officials are evaluating how many vehicles at the yard were damaged and whether they can be repaired, King said.

Other instances of localized flooding and water rescues were also reported in Bridgeport, Fairfield and New Haven.

In Stratford, 4.25 inches of rain had fallen as of 7:52 p.m. yesterday according to Sikorsky Memorial weather station data. Sunday’s rainfall is among the top 25 heaviest rainfall days dating back to the 1940s, according to historical data from the weather station.

But some of the hardest rains in Connecticut fell over the course of just a few hours, prompting several meteorologists to label it a one-in-200-year flood event.

This metric is determined by the probability that an area will see a certain amount of rainfall in a given time period. A 200-year flood has a one in 200, or 0.5% chance, of occurring. Gary Lessor, a meteorologist at Western Connecticut State University, said such historic rainfalls are happening more frequently than the odds would suggest.

“A 200-year flood occurring is not that usual, and it is seemingly happening quite often,” Lessor said.

This photo provided by Westport Fire Department shows flash flooding in Westport, Conn., Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. Credit: Jennifer Petrosinelli / Westport Fire Department via AP

Emma Cimino, the acting commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said climate change is contributing to the severity of the storms and the costs to rebuild.

“Climate-induced extreme rainfall is increasing, even without a comparable increase in annual rainfall,” Cimino said. “And as we’ve heard, as we’ve seen, when intense rain falls quickly, local drainage systems, roads, streams, and other infrastructure can be overwhelmed. It is hard to build infrastructure that can withstand rain like what we saw yesterday.”

Several officials, including Lamont, compared the weekend’s storms to the catastrophic floods that struck the Naugatuck River Valley in 2024, breaking rainfall records and causing an estimated $206 million in damages. While the impacted areas of the state were largely spared that level of devastation, officials were working to determine whether the damage would qualify for a major disaster declaration.

State Emergency Management Director Bill Turner said the threshold to qualify for federal public disaster assistance in Fairfield County is around $5 million, along with $7 million in total statewide damages.

“We’re doing our due diligence and surveying the whole coastline, all the coastal communities, to make sure we’re not missing anything,” Turner said.

King, the deputy DOT Commissioner, said there was no “permanent” damage reported to any state roads. Rail operations along Metro-North Railroad and CT Transit lines had also returned to normal schedules on Monday, she added.

Also on Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved more than $350,000 in federal disaster aid to pay for repairs to Darien’s Gorham Pond Dam, which was damaged in flooding caused by Hurricane Ida in 2021.

John covers energy and the environment for CT Mirror, a beat that has taken him from wind farms off the coast of Block Island to foraging for mushrooms in the Litchfield Hills and many places in between. Prior to joining CT Mirror, he was a statewide reporter for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and before that, he covered politics for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock. A native of Norwalk, John earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from Temple University.

Sasha is a data reporting fellow with The Connecticut Mirror. She graduated from the University of Maryland in May with a degree in journalism and a minor in creative writing. For the past year Sasha was working part time for the Herald-Mail, a newspaper based in Western Maryland. She was also a reporter and copy editor for Capital News Service, the university’s wire service where she covered the state legislature, the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse, school board elections, youth mental health and climate change. Earlier in her college career, Sasha also interned at the Baltimore Magazine and wrote for numerous student publications including the Diamondback, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper.