NORFOLK — When a motorcycle collided with a vehicle on Route 44 in Norfolk on July 5, 2023, passersby called 911 and attended to the injured motorcyclist as he lay bleeding in the hot sun until first responders — the Norfolk Lions Club Ambulance, EMT’s, and a Norfolk firetruck — arrived.
Eight months earlier to the day, a nightmare scenario unfolded on the stretch of Route 44 that passes through the town center. Early on Saturday morning, Nov. 5, a gasoline tanker truck traveling west flipped on its side near Botelle Elementary School, spilling 8,200 gallons of gasoline and causing extensive environmental damage. First Selectman Matt Riiska said it will take years, and millions of dollars, to mitigate the effects of the tanker spill.
Norfolk residents for years have asked state officials to lower the speed limit on the section of state road that passes through Norfolk village, especially near the Town Green and elementary school. Their pleas have yet to be met.
Data on motor vehicle accidents in the Route 44 corridor extending from Winsted through Canaan provide evidence of a sustained rate of accidents. According to the UConn Connecticut Crash Data Repository, from January 2020 to April 2023, there were 278 crashes involving 502 vehicles and 657 people on the section of Route 44 that also serves as Main Street in Winsted, Norfolk, and Canaan. Of those, 215 of did not involve injuries, 35 had multiple injuries, and three involved fatalities.
After the tanker truck crash, 400 concerned citizens, spearheaded by residents Michael Selleck, Larry Hannafin and Sally Carr, signed and sent a petition to Gov. Ned Lamont and the Commissioner of the State Department of Transportation (DOT) on March 29, formally requesting that the Route 44 speed limit be lowered as it passes through Norfolk village — especially near the school and its playground close to the road.
“We propose that the speed limit, which is now 40 mph as it passes the school, be reduced to 25 mph from the intersection of Route 44 and Laurel Way continuing to the intersection of Route 44 and Blackberry Road,” the petition said.
Selleck, who lives alongside Route 44, has written numerous letters to the DOT requesting that the speed limit through town be set at 35 mph. He also requested “School Zone Ahead” signs to slow traffic as it descends a hill by the school.
DOT Commissioner Garrett T. Eucalitto, who grew up in Torrington and drove on Route 44 when he worked summers at Tobey Pond in Norfolk, responded to the petition May 5, promising a meeting with the petitioners. It has yet to be scheduled.
Commissioner Eucalitto, who suggested mitigation such as flashing lights near the school, also promised to send an investigative committee to Norfolk, which has not yet happened.
Meanwhile, Norfolk is investigating other options to address safety issues in a town that eliminated its Resident State Trooper Program in 2015, reducing enforcement capabilities.
A new state law that took effect Oct. 1 allows municipalities to purchase remote speed and red-light cameras that record license plates, driving speeds, and compliance with red lights. Speeding violations documented by the cameras would be treated like traffic tickets. Placement of the cameras would be left to local officials pending approval by the Office of State Traffic Administration (OSTA).
“The Town of Norfolk would like to work with the State of Connecticut to install the speed cameras on Route 44 in the area of Botelle School,” said Norfolk First Selectman Matt Riiska.
“We have tried numerous times to work with the Connecticut DOT to install signage to slow traffic with little effect,” Riiska explained.
“If cameras can be used to record speeders this is an option, we are open to trying,” he said.
Salisbury First Selectman Curtis Rand has also been trying for years to have the speed limit on Route 44/Main Street lowered. The Town of Salisbury requested reviews that were done in 2005, 2010, 2017, and 2021. Rand has received numerous letters of denial from the CTDOT in response to his letters. Recently, Rand has reached out to Norfolk resident Selleck and Norfolk Selectman Riiska to express his shared frustration.
“The problem is that Route 44 is designated an arterial road and as such is harder to regulate,” said Rand in a recent interview. He continued, “While I don’t have a problem with our local District 4 DOT, as the local traffic authority of Salisbury I would like to have a more respectful response from the CTDOT. I would like to meet and discuss the latest solutions for speed mitigation and safety such as roundabouts, median islands, speed cameras, and flashing beacons. I believe that if we join forces with other area towns that share our concerns, we stand a better chance of success. We all want our children to be safe.”
“It’s tragic and unacceptable that Connecticut’s pedestrian deaths are at a 40-year high. It’s not enough to ask drivers to slow down – we know the best way to prevent these tragedies is to start building safety features into our streets, like raised sidewalks or narrower traffic lanes,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-5th District).
“Last year was Connecticut’s deadliest year on the roads — with more than 300 driver, passenger, and pedestrian deaths,” added U.S. Rep. John Larson (D-1).
Left to right: Emi Night (Lead Educator), Luna Reynolds (Intern), Jill Winsby-Fein (Education Coordinator).
The Wassaic Art Project offers a free, weekly drop-in art class for kids aged K-12 and their families every Saturday from 12 to 5 p.m. The Art Nest, as it’s called, is a light, airy, welcoming space perched on the floor of the windy old mill building where weekly offerings in a variety of different media lead by professional artists offer children the chance for exploration and expression. Here, children of all ages and their families are invited to immerse themselves in the creative process while fostering community, igniting imaginations, and forging connections.
Emi Night began as the Lead Educator at The Art Nest in January 2024. She studied painting at Indiana University and songwriting at Goddard College in Vermont and is both a visual artist and the lead songwriter and singer in a band called Strawberry Runners.
Night sources her ideas for projects “from all over,” she said. “Sometimes we’ll pull ideas from artists in the shows [at The Wassaic Project] and if there’s something that seems like it would be fun for the kids, we’ll create a project around it.”
Night emphasized that the Art Nest is a drop-in opportunity as opposed to a drop-off class.
“Some families come in that are new in the area and don’t have a lot of parent friends,” Night said. “And they meet people here and develop a network. It’s a really cool space for that, and art is a great way to bring people together.”
Jill Winsby-Fein, Education Coordinator at The Wassaic Project also emphasized the community aspect of the offering. “We ask families to stay together, and that results in family art making that’s actually really special.”
Depending on the day, there can be up to 20 children and their families in the space. “Most days we have five or six kids at a time,” said Night.
The summer exhibition, “Tall Shadows in Short Order,” opens May 18 and the teachers expect an increase in attendance. The Wassaic Project has partnered with the Intern Project through the NECC (North East Community Center) and Luna Reynolds, a student at Webutuck Central School, is “our intern extraordinaire,” said Winsby-Fein.
“The projects I plan are geared toward kids ages four and up,” said Night, “but they are always adaptable to engage younger artists in sensory play and fine motor skill development. The average age range of attendees since I started working here in January has been three to 12. We do have materials and equipment more appropriate for teens like sewing and embroidery machines, jewelry and wire sculpture tools, button/pin-makers, and we’d love to have more teen artists working in the space.”
The program is funded through the Wassaic Project, which relies on grants, individual and donor funding, and artwork sales. Winsby-Fein is currently in the process of applying for various education grants to help fund the program.
“We have kids who walk from nearby and come every week,” she said. “A lot of the feedback I’ve gotten from families is about the community aspect.”
Families seeking to explore the world of art through The Art Nest are invited to drop by on Saturday afternoons. Visit www.wassaicproject.org for more information.
A detail from a fabric-crafted wall mural by Carlos Biernnay at the annual Kent Arts Association fiber arts show.
The Kent Arts Association, which last summer celebrated 100 years since its founding, unveiled its newest group show on Friday, May 11. Titled “Working the Angles,” the exhibition gathers the work of textile artists who have presented fiber-based quilts, landscapes, abstracts, and mural-sized illustrations. The most prominently displayed installation of fiber art takes up the majority of the association’s first floor on South Main Street.
Bridgeport-based artist Carlos Biernnay was born in Chile under the rule of the late military dictator Augusto Pinochet, but his large-scale work is imbued with fantasy instead of suffering. His mix of influences seems to include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s popular German libretto “The Magic Flute” — specifically The Queen of the Night — as well as Lewis Carol’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” The Tudor Court, tantalizing mermaids and exotic flora.
Upstairs, Litchfield-based fiber artist Karen Griska’s large quilts take inspiration from African tradition, although she has also worked in the styles of Amish quilting as well as the Black American tradition of Gee’s Bend, which began in an Alabama town of the same name.
For more on “Working the Angles” and Kent Art Association exhibition viewing hours go to www.kentart.org
A quilt by Litchfield-based artist Karen Griska.Alexander Wilburn
If last month’s solar eclipse taught me anything, it’s that we all still love seeing cool stuff in the sky. I don’t think we realize how fast astronomical wonders are fading out of sight: studies show that our night skies grow about 10% brighter every year, and the number of visible stars plummets as a result. At this rate, someone born 18 years ago to a sky with 250 visible stars would now find only 100 remaining.
Vanishing stars may feel like just a poetic tragedy, but as I crouch over yet another dead Wood Thrush on my morning commute, the consequences of light pollution feel very real. Wincing, I snap a photo of the tawny feathers splayed around his broken neck on the asphalt.
It’s not the only such photo I’ll take this year. The building whose towering windows took this thrush’s life is infamous; like many other passersby, I pay close attention to the ground around such spots to record any victims. We upload our morbid photography to iNaturalist, an app usually reserved for more cheerful records and identifications of flora and fauna, where they automatically join several citizen science projects focused on bird-window collisions.
Why the macabre gallery? These collections provide concrete evidence of just how many birds windows kill. Ideally, that information encourages tactics to reduce casualties, like lobbying homeowners and institutions to add decals or screens to their glass.
Though such measures are critical for limiting window strikes during the day, we often overlook the damage our windows cause at night. Remarkably, most bird migration actually occurs by moonlight; if you stand under the stars and listen during migration — which began in earnest last week — an audible chorus of chirps and buzzes overhead indicates a sky full of birds.
Birds evolved to fly under the cover of darkness for many reasons. Nightly travel means they can spend the bright, bug-filled days gathering food. Darkness helps migrants avoid predators, and the lower turbulence and cooler temperatures of nighttime skies allows for more energetically efficient flights.
Though the specifics of nocturnal navigation are a longstanding ornithological mystery, that navigation is undoubtedly disrupted by the growing brightness of the night sky. Bright lights disorient the birds’ sense of direction and attract them towards the light sources themselves. In that state of confusion, nocturnal window strikes skyrocket.
In the U.S., one billion birds die each year by flying into windows. Distinct behavioral changes around brightly lit structures are the main cause of mortality: the usual conversation of nocturnal flight calls grows into a confused cacophony. Those that avoid collisions face different risks: the energy they waste investigating unfamiliar lights means they’ll have a harder time avoiding predators, catching enough food, and reaching their final destinations.
The harm caused by light pollution is not limited to birds. Even in rural areas, many nocturnal animals struggle to adapt to brightening nighttime environments: bats can’t fly efficiently, amphibians can’t reproduce normally, and insects can’t forage effectively.
Humans aren’t immune either. Brighter nights disrupt our sleep cycles — something I can personally attest to, as someone who grew up in Kent and now struggles nightly with the brightness of New Haven — and are associated with a slew of negative health effects. And though people widely associate more lights with greater safety, evidence of this is mixed.
Despite the repercussions, the reach and severity of light pollution keeps growing. Electricity usage in the U.S. is on the rise again; while much of that energy has more intensive uses, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that 6% of residential and 17% of commercial energy is all for lighting.
As disheartened as I am by increasing energy usage and vanishing stars, by unnecessary lights glaring from empty sports fields or barren storage facilities, and by dead songbirds on my morning commute, there is a silver lining to this story. Fixing most pollution problems — microplastics, oil spills, atmospheric CO2 — requires complex, intractable solutions. Light pollution, on the other hand, is completely, immediately, effectively reversible.
This is a critical time of year to make that change. The transition from April to May brings spring rains, bursting tree buds, and a deluge of migrating birds: cheerful songs of Yellow Warblers, gleaming feathers of Scarlet Tanagers, playful flights of American Redstarts. You can watch these migrants gather above your home like a rising storm using BirdCast, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s avian version of a weather radar.
The closer that storm comes, the more important it is to flip those light switches off. Simple steps, like limiting the use of aesthetic lighting, keeping the beams of necessary lights targeted, dim, and warmly colored, or curtaining bright windows, make all the difference to our birds. Participating in darkening the skies this spring will help keep these little travelers aloft — and maybe bring some stars back into view, too.
Alison Robey is a writer for the Kent Land Trust, a volunteer at the Sharon Audubon Center, and a third-year PhD candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.
