After All Things

Office building break-in

A Connecticut state office building was closed today after a man broke in over the weekend. A New York air conditioning program has run out of funds. New York Democrats seek to take back a few Long Island congressional seats. And why has Connecticut seen a large spike in alcohol-related deaths?

Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 29 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Support for After All Things comes from the listeners of WSHU, a public radio station serving Connecticut and Long Island. For daily news and culture from around the sound, listen at WSHU.org or download the WSHU app. You're listening to After All Things, WSHU's daily news and culture update from the Long Island Sound region. A Connecticut State office building was closed today after a man broke in over the weekend. Funding for a New York air conditioning program has run out. And Connecticut has had the highest jump in alcohol-related deaths in the country. Those stories and more are ahead. I'm Sabrina Garon. A Connecticut State office building was closed today after a Pennsylvania man broke into the building's basement over the weekend. It houses the State Attorney General's office and the State Comptroller's office. WSHU's Ebang Udama has more. 43-year-old Christian Gonzalez of Shillington, Pennsylvania was arrested on Sunday after he allegedly forcibly entered a utility area in the basement of the building through a metal grate. He's been arraigned in Hartford Superior Court charged with burglary, possession of burglary tools, trespassing and criminal mischief. State troopers and Hartford Police found Gonzalez in the building's transformer vault after they responded to a security alarm. State officials say several utilities had been damaged, which led to power outages and system failures throughout the building. Crews from ever-sourced restored power on Sunday night and building management and IT crews have been working to restore the building's systems. Ebang Udama, WSH News. New York State has a program to help families pay for air conditioning units to stay safe during extreme heat. But with summer only halfway over, the funding for that program has run out. Rebecca Rettlemeyer has more. New York State has closed applications for this year's Cooling Assistance program. It covers the cost of an air conditioning unit or fan for eligible low-income households that include members who are vulnerable to heat, like those with a medical condition exacerbated by extreme heat, and children and older adults. A spokesperson for the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance said the program opened on April 15, two weeks earlier than last year, to encourage early applications so more AC units could be installed before the hot weather arrived. The program closed on July 19. After all applications are processed, the state expects to have spent the $22 million of federal funding earmarked for the program to serve more than 27,000 New York households. I'm Rebecca Rettlemeyer for the New York Public News Network. The race to replace Connecticut State Senator Marilyn Moore is heating up. Bridgeport Monroe and Trumbull residents have two chances to hear from the candidates before the Democratic primary. WSHU's Molly Ingram has more. Four candidates are vying for the Democratic nomination for the 22nd Senate District. They are Bridgeport City Councilman Scott Burns, former Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, Quinnipiac Professor Sujada Gadkar Wilcox, and former City Councilman Tyler Mack. The League of Women Voters is hosting a debate between the candidates on August 1 at the Trumbull Library. And Fairfield University is hosting a candidate forum on August 5 at their Bellarmine campus. Both events begin at 6.30 and are open to the public. The Democratic and Republican primaries for state and U.S. Senate and House of Representatives races are on August 13. Early in-person voting begins on August 5 and ends on the 11th. Molly Ingram, WSHU News. More information about those events is available at WSHU.org. The alcohol-related death rate nearly tripled between 2012 and 2022 in Connecticut. More on that is ahead after a message from our supporter. ♪ Local support comes from Hartford HealthCare, the only health system in the Northeast, with all its hospitals receiving A grades for safety from the LeapFrog Group, the nation's leading independent safety watchdog group, HartfordHealthCare.org. ♪ New York's Democratic Party is outlining its strategy for the fall congressional elections, looking to reverse its losses in 2022 that helped Republicans take control of the House. In a public memo out today, the party says it's using a coordinated campaign to target seven districts statewide, three of them on Long Island. Among the districts it wants to flip are the first, represented by first-term Republican, Nickelodeon, and the fourth, represented by first-term Republican, Anthony D. Esposito. The third district represented by Democrat Tom Swazie needs protection against a Republican challenger, according to the memo. Motorcycle fatalities are on the rise on Long Island. Newsday says 12 people died from motorcycle crashes in May and June of this year, a 100% increase from the same time last year. More than 190 people died from motorcycle crashes in New York statewide in 2023. Parts of I-95 and Stanford are the top third, fourth, and ninth busiest corridors in the country, according to an in-ricks global traffic scorecard from last year. Each road was ranked by their peak minutes and hours lost. I-95, northbound near Sherwood Island, lost the most time. The Connecticut Blood Center issued an emergency call for blood last week due to low supply. WSHU's Ada Usenlar reports. The center says the shortage happened for two reasons. First, a seasonal dip in donations in the summer months due to travel and summer break from school. And second, something called trauma season, which falls between Memorial Day and Labor Day. It's when health care centers see a spike in traumatic accidents in the warmer months. The center says the region only has a two or three-day supply of blood types O negative, O positive, and B negative. The blood center issued what it said was an urgent call for both type O negative and type O positive blood. Ada Usenlar, WSHU News. The alcohol-related death rate nearly tripled between 2012 and 2022 in Connecticut. Experts point to a cultural change that has normalized drinking alcohol at events that were historically sober. WSHU's Abong Udama spoke with the Connecticut mirrors Caitlin Poli, who's done in-depth reporting on this. It's part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. What prompted you to look into alcohol-related deaths in Connecticut? And were you surprised by what you found? Yeah, it's a good question. So I'm a rising junior now at Yale. And being a college student, there's kind of substances all over college campuses now. And I was thinking about social life at Yale and how alcohol and substance dependent, it can really be sometimes. And then long toner recovery, which is the organization that conducted the study that I cited in my article, they actually reached out to me with the data that they had found about Connecticut. And given kind of my personal experience and also my interest in public health, it felt like an interesting lead to pursue. And, you know, I was really surprised on their study and their findings. You know, when I think about alcoholism in the United States, there are states that come to mind, like Alaska or Wyoming, these more rural states where we see alcohol-related deaths that they're a lot more prevalent in those states. Obviously, you know, the raw numbers for Connecticut are a lot lower than those states, but what was really interesting and what the article is about is about that percent increase. And what the study found was that there was 166% increase in alcohol-related deaths in a 10-year period between 2012 and 2022. Yes. And the spike was during COVID. Yes. The highest year recorded was 2020. But it didn't come down to pre-COVID levels after that. No, no, it did not. What do they think is responsible for that? So, one of the physicians that I spoke to for the story, Dr. Alan, he works at Hartford HealthCare, and he had a bunch of different hypotheses about why, you know, that COVID-related spike kind of persisted, even after the height of the pandemic. One of which that I found really interesting was Connecticut's geographic proximity to really big finance hubs and large metropolitan areas for the country being so close and kind of in between both Boston and New York City. You see, you know, a lot more transport and a lot more commuting in Connecticut than perhaps in other states, either between those two big cities or to one of those cities. And so that was one of the reasons that he thought alcohol-related deaths, a lot of which are drunk driving accidents. That was one of the reasons he thought. And we've had a spike in drunk driving accidents. Yes, we have. What do you find, as far as the families, how are families coping with this? It's difficult, and in the sense that, as opposed to, you know, other illnesses, something like, like cancer, which is obviously really hard on a family, but you don't feel a certain sense of guilt or responsibility as a family member, the same way you do with alcoholism, which, you know, is a disease like, like any other, and Ms. Carolyn, who I spoke to for the story, she runs Parent Connection, which is a kind of like a parent resource center. That's Dory Carolyn, right? Yes, so Dory, she lost her son to a drug overdose in 1983. Great. She started the company after that and wanted to help parents who were dealing with the same issues she was dealing with, but in the last few years, you know what she told me was that she's not seeing opioid related addiction, and people coming in, or families coming in with that issue, as much as she's seeing families come in with children dealing with alcoholism or children dealing with alcohol dependency. And what she was saying is that, you know, alcohol is so ingrained in every area of our society, it's embedded in celebration and morning, Dr. Alan, you know, he kind of said the same thing and I spoke to him right after the 4th of July and he was like, you know, I was driving by a gas station close to me and half of the liquor area of the store was sold out after 4th of July because alcohol is so embedded in those celebrations and it's become so normalized and so for parents who are dealing with this. It's easier to give your kid a glass of wine at the age of 16 and you might not necessarily realize the path you're subconsciously leading them down. Something interesting that I saw in your article is how much it costs the state of Connecticut alcohol related deaths, because excessive alcohol use, you say it was estimated to cost the state about $3 billion in 2010 it's now up to $4 billion in 2022 dollars. What does that mean? Yeah, I mean, you see, you see that cost come in a lot of different ways in terms of, for example, like traffic collisions and the impact that has on Connecticut's roads and the repairs that they need to be done, or on the criminal justice system. If, you know, you're then arresting someone who was driving one drunk, then obviously there is the cost of putting that person through the criminal justice system. And so there's a lot of different ways in which alcohol related death and alcoholism has an impact on the state. But lawmakers tried to do something about this in the general assembly this year. What did they try to do, and apparently it didn't make it. It didn't so they tried to pass a bill in the state, in the state Senate that would lower the blood alcohol content legal limit for driving from 0.08 to 0.05 49 states in the US, have a legal BAC of 0.08. The state that has a legal limit of 0.05 is Utah. It's not that it didn't pass. It's that it ended up getting tabled by the end of the session. However, there's been a big push to have it reintroduced next year and have it redubated because the statistics are kind of only getting worse that alcohol related deaths in the state are continuing to not necessarily increase but continuing to kind of make it an alarming number. And so there is a possibility that a bill will get passed next year. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Caitlin. Yeah, thank you. Caitlin Poli is a general reporting intern with the Connecticut Mirror. I'm Ebon Dama. Thank you so much for listening to After All Things, supported by Hartford HealthCare. For more stories from the Long Island Sound region, you can listen on the radio, stream online at WSHU.org or download the WSHU app. That's also where you can get more great podcasts from WSHU, like Long Story Short, which we just heard a bit from there, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, reach out with any thoughts or story ideas. Our email is news@wshu.org. I'm Sabrina Garon. Enjoy the rest of your day. I'll talk to you tomorrow. [Music] (soft music) You