Connecticut farmhand, 59, is left paralyzed from the waist down after he was attacked by a bull in heat while milking cows – as his sister says he ‘was in the wrong place at wrong time’
Connecticut farmhand, 59, is left paralyzed from the waist down after he was attacked by a bull in heat while milking cows – as his sister says he ‘was in the wrong place at wrong time’
Randy Jaquins, 59, was left lying with his injuries for ‘quite some time’
The farmhand was charged by a bull ‘in heat’ shortly after milking cows
His sister Ellen Hull said he was ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’
By Will Potter For Dailymail.Com
Updated:
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A Connecticut farmhand has been left paralyzed from the waist down after he was charged by a bull ‘in heat’.
Randy Jaquins, 59, had just finished milking cows and was leading the animals back into a barn when he was attacked by the bull at Locust Road Farm in Winsted, Connecticut on Friday.
‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ his sister Ellen Hull told Hearst Connecticut Media. ‘The bull was in heat because it’s their mating season at this time of year.’
Jaquins suffered a broken neck and his sister said he told her he was left lying with his injuries for ‘quite some time’ before he was found.
Randy Jaquins, 59, had just finished milking cows when he was charged by the bull
Experts warn that bulls are aggressive and unpredictable when they are in mating season (stock photo)
After the farmer was eventually discovered, Jaquins was rushed to a nearby hospital.
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The farmhand was left paralyzed alone for ‘quite some time’ before he was found
Doctors were able to fuse a vertebrae in his neck, and Hull said when she visited her brother in the hospital he was conscious and speaking.
‘He’s aware of what happened,’ she said.
‘He told me that he had been laying in the field for quite some time that day before anyone found him.’
Hull added that his recovery will be a ‘big adjustment’, and said that his family ‘don’t even know hw long he’s going to be at the hospital at this point.’
In a GoFundMe set up to help with his rehabilitation, his sister said: ‘We are all hoping this will be temporary but are preparing for the worst.’
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Experts warn that bulls can become violent and unpredictable when they are in heat, which occurs during mating season at the peak of summer.
The breed, which account for only around two percent of cattle numbers in the US, were responsible for 48 percent of deaths caused by cattle in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and the Surveillance of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses databases.
Biden approves emergency declaration request in 3 Connecticut counties – CBS New York
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Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont says President Joe Biden has approved his request for an emergency declaration in Fairfield, New Haven and Litchfield counties. It comes after historic rainfall over the weekend.
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What at first appeared on radar as a relatively modest line of storms moving into Connecticut, was suddenly supercharged into a deadly flash flood — the same weather pattern responsible for Vermont’s two rounds of devastating flooding in July.
Stagnant, ‘training’ storms
Like trains on a track,Sunday’s thunderstorms kept multiplying over the same region, inundating parts of Fairfield and New Haven counties with flooding rains. A region that normally sees 3.5 inches of rain on average for the entire month of August was pounded with 13 to 16 inches of flooding rains, most of which fell within six to seven hours, state officials said.
Meteorologists said the deadly confluence of a very slow-moving system, an already extremely moist summer weather pattern and these “training” rainstorms wreaked havoc on the region, stretching from Fairfield to the Lower Naugatuck Valley, including Oxford and Monroe. Training storms develop when thunderstorms repeatedly move over the same area, generating from the outflow of previous storms, over and over again. Each storm is following along a path, lining up over the same region one after another like train cars on a track, except the track is not moving.
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“Deep tropical moisture was in place, and there was no shortage of water vapor to work with,” said Ryan Hanrahan, chief meteorologist for NBC Connecticut. “A very narrow band of convergence developed, and thunderstorms kept redeveloping over this convergence zone.” Examples of convergence zones are fronts and boundaries like sea and land breezes. They act as a trigger for thunderstorms and in the Connecticut and Vermont flooding events, that zone of convergence barely moved.
The storms were “able to back build at times” and the hardest-hit town of Oxford, where two people died, swept away by floodwaters, was “in the bull’s-eye,” said James Tomasini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New York.
The Beacon Falls, Conn., Hose Company 1 rescues stranded patrons from the Brookside Inn Restaurant in Oxford amid rising floodwaters Sunday evening.Beacon Hose Co. 1
Research by climate scientists Jennifer Francis, Stephen Vavrus and Michael Mann has found that climate change has resulted in these stagnant patterns that allow storm systems to stall out, increasing the likelihood of flooding events both on a small scale (like in Connecticut) and on a larger scale (like with Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017).
Meteorologists said the Connecticut flooding was unrelated to Hurricane Ernesto, which on Monday was over the open Atlantic Ocean.
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Damage from flood waters is shown on Cottage Street in Monroe, Conn., Monday, Aug. 19, 2024. (Arnold Gold/Hearst Connecticut Media)Arnold Gold/Associated Press
Forecast models missed the mark
The intensity of last weekend’s storms caught forecasters by surprise. Even the morning of massive flooding, models predicted only 6 inches of rain.
“These events fly under the radar. We need to do a better job at looking at these localized, very high impact events,” Hanrahan said.
Today’s forecast models, although sophisticated, still lack the finer resolution to accurately capture and pinpoint small-scale variations in terrain, weather patterns, and local atmospheric conditions.
One forecast model from Sunday morning showed around 6 inches of rain for southwestern Connecticut.Pivotal Weather/Tim Kelley
But despite the models miscalculating the dire nature of the approaching storms, warnings from the National Weather Service were issued well ahead of time, meteorologists said. The first flash flood warning of the day was issued at 9:26 a.m. on Sunday, according to James Tomasini, a meteorologist with the NWS in New York. The urgency of the alerts increased throughout the day and eventually a Flash Flood Emergency was issued by mid-afternoon, warning residents to take swift action to protect themselves from rapidly rising floodwaters.
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1-in-100 years now every 20 years
A warmingclimate, scientists say, has increased the frequency and intensity of flooding in the Northeast due to heavier bursts of rain.
The traditional “1-in-100-year” rainfall event — or, a storm with a 1 percent chance of happening each year — now occurs about every 20 years in Connecticut, according to an analysis conducted by Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research for First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that quantifies financial climate risk.
In other words, the same type of extreme rainstorm that was once a rare occurrence in Connecticut is five times more likely now.
Extreme precipitation has increased by about 60 percent in the Northeastsince the 1950s,according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Flooding events are expected to become “flashier” across the US as the climate warms, according to a 2023 federal meteorological assessment of extreme weather trends.
Extreme flooding events in the Northeast have increased by 60 percent between the 1950s and now.Climate Central
The driving force behind this shift in weather patterns has been our warming planet, say meteorologists and other scientists. According to Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with Climate Central, when the atmosphere warms by just 1 degree Fahrenheit, there is 4 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere, meaning more water is now available during these heavy rain events.
High ocean temperatures don’t help, as theyadd further moisture into the atmosphere. That abundant moisture is often injected into storm systems such as the one Connecticut experienced Sunday. Warming ocean currents off Connecticut are 10 times more likely due to climate change, according to the Climate Central Climate Shift Index.
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University of Connecticut researchers project that annual precipitation in the state could increase by as much as 8.5 percent by the middle of the century compared to the 1970s if there is no action to reduce emissions.
This Climate Shift Index for oceans shows warm weather in Long Island Sound is up to 10 times more likely due to climate change.Climate Central
James O’Donnell, executive director of the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation, said limited state data on precipitation and global climate models that are difficult to scale down make it challenging to predict where extreme flash flooding could occur.
But even if scientists can’t pinpoint exactly where intense flooding will worsen in a warmer climate “It’s likely that extreme precipitation events will increase in frequency,” O’Donnell said.
“These events — 10 inches in a day, or 12 inches in a day — we should plan for that everywhere in Connecticut,” he said.
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For every 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere holds 4 percent more moisture.Climate Central
‘No infrastructure can sustain it’
State officials and climate experts say Connecticut’s roads, bridges, and stormwater drainage system, much of it aging and built for a climate that no longer exists, like that of Vermont, cannot withstand such extreme rainstorms.
Rain totaling 13 to 16 inches, roughly 6 inches an hour, quickly swelled into dangerous rushing floodwaters that coursed through the town of Oxford, about 25 miles northwest of New Haven.
“It was a catastrophic amount of rain — no infrastructure could sustain it,” said state Senator Tony Hwang, who represents Newtown and Bethel, two towns also hard hit by the severe flooding.
Much of Connecticut’s climate adaptation efforts have been focused on protecting communities from storm surges as sea levels rise, particularly after devastating flooding from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
“It’s not just sea level rise and coastal storms, but also the potential for inland flooding that we need to think about,” said Christine Kirchhoff, who worked on Connecticut’s climate resilience planning efforts.
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Flash flood damage on the grounds of The Waterview reception hall in Monroe, Conn., is shown Monday.Arnold Gold/Associated Press
The challenge, she said, is that adapting to a changing climate is “a moving target” so long as fossil fuel emissions are added to the earth’s atmosphere. “What we adapt to today will be different from what we need to adapt to tomorrow,” Kirchhoff said.
Michael Jastremski, watershed conservation director for the Housatonic Valley Association in western Connecticut, said that there are thousands of culverts in the state that carry stormwater and streams beneath roads, yet many of them are too small.
The association surveys culverts and advocates for larger storm infrastructure. In an initial assessment of culverts in the Housatonic River watershed, he said, about 18 percent of the culverts they’ve surveyed would fail in a flood that occurs on average once every 25 years, meaning that water would overtop the road that the culvert is intended to protect.
“This could’ve been a regional event, and that’s what keeps me up at night,” Jastremski said. “When this is happening in 20 towns or 30 towns instead of eight or 10.”
Meteorologist Chris Gloninger is a senior scientist in climate and risk communication at the Woods Hole Group. Follow him at @ChrisGloninger.
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Erin Douglas can be reached at erin.douglas@globe.com. Follow her @erinmdouglas23.
A horrifying video shows the moment a single mother’s home collapsed and was tossed into a river during a deadly storm in Connecticut. The two-story house was seen crumbling to pieces after hours of heavy rainfall and flooding.
Connecticut home collapses, tossed into river by deadly storm in horrifying video (@BrittanyTVNews/X via Chris Hofmann)
The video shows tables and chairs spilling out from the structure moments before the roof collapses, sliding down the embankment below it and onto the rocky bank of the brook, which had swelled up during the storm. Homeowner Randi Marcucio and her son, 3, managed to escape the tragedy.
‘The river started to take the massive, tall, tall, tall deck pillars’
“You just fall to the ground. There goes everything,” Marcucio told New York Post.
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Marcucio is a single mom and ER nurse. She had lived in the Oxford home for two-and-a-half years. She bought the house on Mother’s Day in 2022. The beautiful narrow Fivemile Brook running along the property enchanted her.
Marcucio was preparing to cook dinner last week when the storm caused the brook to surge. The flooding became monstrous, turning the street into a river and washing away chunks of the dirt hill where the home rested. “The river started to take the massive, tall, tall, tall deck pillars,” Marcucio said.
“The deck started to go. The deck went. The oil tank detached from the house. Over hours, slowly but surely, everything just started to go. The basement started to go. The basement went. A lot of the basement went. And then the second story was just kind of hanging,” she added.
On Monday, August 19, the home collapsed. However, Marcucio was away at the time, helping neighbours find shelter during the storm. She later slept at her parent’s home.
It was a neighbour who heard cracking and ran to Marcucio’s house, only to discover that it was gone. Marcucio said she would not be able to recuperate her losses. The damage is not covered as she did not have flood insurance.
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Marcucio, however, is maintaining a positive attitude, and finds strength in the love of her son. “He’s incredible. He’s such a smart, happy kid, and he knows something’s wrong, but he’s happy to see mommy,” Marcucio said.
“He doesn’t even really know what’s happening. He just knows that people keep showing up for him … He’s seen me at different homes, he’s seen me soaking wet. He’s seen me crying in the last day so he’s happy that mommy’s here, and now he gets to show mommy the things his ‘friends’ — strangers — have come to him with,” she added, referring to donations made by her neighbours and the money raised in a GoFundMe.
“Oh, my God. It’s incredible. You want to die in one breath and then the next breath you’re like, ‘This is everything. This is life,” Marcuico said.
She added, “I didn’t lose my life. My son didn’t lose his life. We lost our stuff. Two women lost their lives. How can I even begin to complain about anything?”
The storm was so destructive that two women were killed about five miles north of Marcucio’s property. One of them was swept away while walking down the street.