HARTFORD -- The governor of Connecticut is blowing his stack.

"I'm going to finally have, on Day 6, the No. 2 person in Homeland Security show up in my state," Dan Malloy snaps into the cell phone, as the black Suburban roars through traffic on Interstate 84, "and I'm supposed to be excited about that?!"

The poor soul on the other end of the line is a midlevel staffer from the White House, the latest in a series of second-tier federal officials from whom Malloy and his chief of staff, Tim Bannon, have been trying to get the answer to one simple question: Is FEMA going to issue a major disaster declaration to help them cope with this snowstorm or not?

An answer has not been forthcoming. Now Malloy, fed up after a drive through the still dark and chilly towns that ring the capital, sensing the public anger at the utility company's incompetence starting to splash over onto him, lowers the same boom that Bannon was wielding a few hours earlier on a similarly testy phone call to the Department of Homeland Security.

He makes the Katrina comparison.

"The one thing, the one thing that I am waiting for, and that I will talk about, is this declaration. So you take as long as you want!" Malloy says, and the voice of the aide echoes tinnily out of the earpiece of the phone, audible in the SUV over the whir of the police lights and the rush of tires.

The primary issue is money: The feds don't want to commit to helping with storm costs until towns can produce receipts and invoices for the costs of cleanup, a laughable impossibility to Malloy and Bannon at the time.

"All I want to know is are you going to reimburse `em?" Malloy demands. He is shouting now, as the SUV approaches the Capitol Avenue exit ramp and the state Armory, where he is threatening to add an agenda to the next televised briefing: how the federal government is screwing up again. "So don't sign it, just tell me you're going to reimburse `em!"

His voice drops to just above a whisper, but takes on a twinge of dark sarcasm.

"I'm sure that this is being heard on the highest level. I want it to be heard on the highest levels, and the reality is -- you know what we could do? We could arrange for your highest-ranking person to fly over our state tonight and look out the window and see how many people don't have power. Is that what you want to do? In my state?"


The Malloy administration was buffeted by snows from the start, and that gave him two quick lessons. First, it felt so good, as good as he had imagined, to take charge. The new governor in his Team Malloy Wyman fleece, chairing the conference calls from the Emergency Operations Center, a glass-walled cube built deep at the center of the massive stone armory on Broad Street. And he got great press from it, too. Malloy scarcely could have conjured a better set of circumstances in which to prove his differentness from the governor who came before, the staff believed. He wanted the spotlight of the EOC briefing room, the responsibility of telling people to do the obvious and non-obvious things they'd need to do to survive the weather.

But there was a second object lesson in those storms, the one the governor learned in the succeeding days, as he kept his existing appointments, traversing the state on the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways, through graying snow drifts caked up nearly to the edges of the lanes.

The people didn't always listen.

As the storms approached in early January, Malloy took to the airwaves, warning everyone that meteorologists predicted heavy snowfall. They would need to clear off their roofs, he said. But in the days that followed, report after report popped up on the local news, or came in via panicked phone call to Tim Bannon: flat-roofed office buildings and stores, small factories and schools, barns and houses, buckling under the weight.

Soon he was marking the passing miles by counting off the collapsed structures visible through the trees, tar-papered wood frames split open like dashed mussels. With each one, he shook his head. As the Lincoln zipped along, the black-cased BlackBerry would buzz, frequently with calls from Bannon. The mayor of Vernon has just called in a frenzy, asking them to send the National Guard to shore up a school roof.

Malloy greets these calls with heavy sighs. Speaking about the people who run school districts and towns, he sounds like an armchair quarterback or a retired coach watching his old team bumble an easy play. You run a school district! The governor shouldn't have to tell you to clear thousands of pounds of snow off the gym roof. But he did, and you didn't listen anyway!


The notion of a hurricane had seemed a little outlandish when they gathered to prepare contingency plans just a few weeks earlier. Now it is here: Irene, already whipping the Carolina coast, and seemingly headed for landfall in Stamford, Connecticut.

Shortly before 4 p.m. on Aug. 27, the governor and his staff stroll in and out of the conference room in the EOC, as a low hum of preparatory conversation -- liaisons talking with emergency department heads and fire officials in towns around the state -- burble around them.

Tim Bannon moves a little more urgently than the others, shuttling back and forth between Dan Malloy's end of the table and his own, stepping outside to talk on the phone. The reason for his agitation lay 60 miles away, in the emergency operations center in Bridgeport. Even as the storm warnings became increasingly dire, and the chance of significant flooding rose for cities along the Long Island Sound, Bill Finch, the city's mayor, doesn't want to issue mandatory evacuation orders in the lowest-lying neighborhoods. More to the point, Bannon learns, in a series of emails and phone calls with Adam Wood, Finch's chief of staff, the Bridgeport administration wonders if the state couldn't take on that task instead.

Malloy rolls his eyes, and sighs.

"We're not evacuating Bridgeport, and they've got to understand that," he says. The decision, and the authority for the order, is the city's. "Everyone else between Greenwich and New Haven seems to get it," Malloy says in the general direction of the counsel for the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, Brenda Bergeron. "You might want to tell them that."

Bannon is incredulous.

The chief of staff huddles with Andrew McDonald, the general counsel, and Roy Occhiogrosso, the senior adviser, as Malloy talks by phone to people in Stamford, where two of his brothers, and his own house, sit within the reach of expected storm surges. Does Finch really think he can avoid the unpopular step of clearing neighborhoods by having the state evacuate his whole city?

"How would we delineate the streets" to evacuate, McDonald asks rhetorically.

"All I'm saying is I feel like we're getting set up here," Occhiogrosso says.

Bannon and McDonald reply in unison: "Oh, yeah."

They decide to drop a line to a local reporter, a suggestion that he ask City Hall what's up. Just then, gruff-voiced Bill Hackett walks in. The state emergency management director just got a call from Stamford. Mayor Michael Pavia has decided to close the city's emergency operations center at 6 p.m., just as other cities are making their final preparations before the storm arrives.

"Can't make this up," Hackett says, shaking his head.

Bannon is agape. The governor hasn't heard yet; Malloy is still on the phone with his sister-in-law.

Arielle Reich has heard a similar rumor, from a friend in Stamford. City officials in Stamford think the storm is being over-hyped. They're packing it in.

"They're going to be hit by a hurricane!" Bannon exclaims. "This is for real? They're actually going to close?"

Occhiogrosso walks in. "The place where the hurricane is supposed to hit? Why would he do that?"

When the governor hangs up, Bannon relays the news.

"All right," Malloy says, "that's his call." There is a chuckle in his voice. What can he do about it now. Sitting next to him, Arielle is digging a number for Pavia out of his phone, and she leaves a message, asking the mayor to call the governor at once. He never does.

Bannon, meanwhile, picks up his own ringing cell phone, speaks briefly into it and hangs up, chuckling.

"They've decided to order a mandatory in Bridgeport," he says. One less crisis, for now.


"This is starting to be a political problem for me."

Dan Malloy says this quietly, almost gently, to Rich Serino, the deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It is Aug. 30. The men sit very close together at the conference table in the EOC, and Malloy gestures, asking someone to put up, for Serino's viewing pleasure, the Connecticut Light & Power map of the electricity outages that remain widespread across the eastern end of the state, two days after Irene. Already, the CL&P officials have warned Malloy, this is the worst power outage Connecticut has faced since Hurricane Gloria in 1985. Trees heavy with rainwater are still toppling in the high winds; tens of thousands of people are without power.

And he has seen it, with one of Serino's underlings sitting knee-to-knee, from the open window of a National Guard Black Hawk helicopter: the deep brown reflection of water between the trees, high above the river banks in Bristol, inundating the pumpkin and cornfields along the Connecticut River, enveloping golf course pavilions up to their rooflines, water where no water should be. So why isn't FEMA more urgent?

Malloy wants to know why New Jersey gets a visit from the president and Vermont gets the Homeland Security secretary. Just to get Serino here, Dan Malloy has called Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano directly and pressed his case. He also called FEMA's general counsel, pleading for a disaster declaration that would speed money for reimbursements and cleanup. Near the end of that call, growing frustrated, McDonald slipped a piece of paper in front of his boss, and Malloy wrapped up with an unsubtle reminder: They would try to make sure Sen. Joe Lieberman and his staff could participate in the next briefing. Lieberman has been virtually invisible in Connecticut during the storm and utterly unrepresented in the EOC; but he also sits at the head of the committee that sets FEMA's budget. At that gibe, McDonald grinned.

Now, he's face-to-face with Serino. Until they get a perfunctory visit from Napolitano, more from the TV news cameras than for anything Malloy needs, Serino and his FEMA crew are all he's got.

"It's important that you help us convince people that we're making progress every day," the governor says, and Serino nods.

Meanwhile, it falls to McDonald and Brenda Bergeron to play the bad cops.

"Maybe you guys know something I don't," McDonald says, leaning over the conference a few moments later with the FEMA team. They're talking about an announcement from across the border: New York has its emergency declaration, but seemingly without jumping through all the steps that the Connecticut officials have been asked to complete. "What I saw was a letter from (Gov. Andrew) Cuomo to the president, and a very substantive application with no data in it." The FEMA officials have no answer to that.

Meanwhile, the reporters crowding the briefing room in the Armory want answers from the state's utilities, particularly from Jeff Butler, CL&P's chief operating officer. Butler has a puncher's nose, and the sad, gray monotone delivery of a man with no good answers. Malloy stands beside him in these briefings, and frequently jumps in to defend him as the questioning turns from adversarial to hostile. It is a historic storm, the worst in a generation, not some midsummer shower. The crews from out of state are on their way, Butler says, and Malloy backs him up. But there is worse damage, in New Jersey and in Vermont.


Still, out on the road, there is cause for doubt. In Ledyard, Malloy is met on the side of Colonel Ledyard Highway by a passel of frustrated, angry residents: the apartment complex manager, the woman who has been filling her toilet tank from a swimming pool, the man who swears his politically connected neighbors got their lights back on first.

Inside the darkened town hall, with a resident state trooper guarding the door to keep out residents and the press, sit the town's mayor, Fred Allyn, with a small group of neighboring mayors and emergency workers. A generator grinds away in the parking lot, powering the limping freezers that keep the ice and perishables cold. The group sits in the dark, frustrated and confused by the state's paralysis.

In the little town hall in Sprague, the first selectman of tiny Lisbon, a mustachioed firefighter named Tom Sparkman, is at a quiet seethe as he waits his turn to speak.

"I can't match their PR machine," he says contemptuously of CL&P. "Just tell the truth. The residents can handle it. Just tell the truth."

Power has been out for days, not just to homes but to the cell phone towers that increasingly drop calls, even as the town officials struggle to discern where to pick up shipments of water and MREs or to connect with the senior citizens they fear will come to harm in isolation.

"I agree with you, don't get me wrong," Malloy says to Sparkman, even as he tries to assure the officials that progress is being made. "It's this expectation thing."

Back in the Capitol, Occhiogrosso is scarfing down a lunch at his desk. A "lightbulb clicked on" during the most recent conference call of municipal leaders, all venting, in various stages of fury, their anger at the inability of anyone to restore electricity, and with it, normal order.

"I think he realizes that his administration could rise and fall based on whether or not they get the power back on," Occhiogrosso says of his boss. "And he doesn't have much control over any of it. So I think it's making him really nervous."

The utility officials are nervous, too, and Butler is taking a daily bludgeoning, as he struggles to convince skeptical reporters that the company's cost-cutting on line crews isn't contributing to its struggles to restore service. ("We're going to go in and get the carcass in about 20 minutes," Occhiogrosso cracks, during one of Butler's turns before the cameras.)

But the governor refuses to leave the utility bosses under the bus alone.

"I hope you notice," Malloy says to Butler and Jim Torgerson, the head of United Illuminating, on Aug. 31, as the pace of restoration appears poised to increase at last, "I'm not bashing you."

THE october nor'easter

"Hit that number," Dan Malloy says, in a tone of warning to Jeff Butler.

It's Nov. 3, a Thursday and Butler has just told live television viewers that 99 percent of his out-of-service electric customers will have power back by midnight Sunday.

Malloy is back in the EOC, incredibly, and back to waiting on CL&P to restore electricity after a storm. This time is even worse, a freak, late-October snowstorm that has snapped trees and downed power lines across the entire north of the state. Well over 500,000 customers remain without power days later, as Malloy calls out his warning to Butler, who is passing by the sliding glass door of the conference room. No one in the governor's inner circle thinks, this time, that the utility can do it.

The sympathy with which Malloy, Tim Bannon and the others viewed the utilities in the year's first catastrophic storm is gone now. Too many repetitions of the same problems that CL&P said it would fix after Irene: lack of communication, lack of work crews.

A selectman on one of the daily conference calls for municipal leaders and state officials says a utility crew arrived at last in her darkened town, did one quick job and drove away again. Dan Malloy looks over at Butler, sitting against a wall in the small room.

"You did indicate that you'd have a dedicated crew for every town," he says, "and the expectation was that was for more than an hour and a half."

Up in his office in the Capitol on Nov. 3, Bannon receives yet another report -- there are too many this time to dismiss them out of hand -- that CL&P is moving crews ahead of the governor when he goes out to survey damage, to create the perception of action. Meanwhile, the Malloy administration can't get an answer from anyone in Washington, D.C., about the aid they need. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security want paperwork to prove this is a major disaster, the kind that qualifies towns for financial aid. But paper requires power, and many towns are still in the dark.

They decide on a sneak attack. Malloy and Bannon, Occhiogrosso and Bill Hackett, Gen. Thad Allen, head of the National Guard, head out unannounced to track down the truth. Are the roads still impassable in Farmington, as someone said on the conference call this morning? They're not. But the power's still out, and the trees hang perilously over small-frame houses. Angry looking homeowners futz with the debris on front lawns as the SUV creeps by. Reports keep flooding in: deaths by carbon monoxide poisoning as people try to heat their houses, town officials warning that the residents in the make-shift warming centers and shelters are going crazy.

In the back seat, Occhiogrosso and Bannon are planning a tour and a briefing for Rich Serino. They've been planning all afternoon. They need him to really see the damage, so he can push to get them money from the federal government. But Malloy cuts them off, sharply, from the front seat.

"I have no desire to have the deputy administration from FEMA anywhere near where I am until we get a declaration," the governor snaps.

Don't they need him to hear what's going on, the aides protest, but Malloy is adamant. He can see it all now, how they're being played. Last time around, during Irene, FEMA even sent its own photographer, a nice woman who snapped away as he sat hunched over the conference table with Serino, his deep Boston accent, his kind, heavy face.

"I am not going to play host to somebody who's not being helpful," Malloy says. "So I have no desire to play host anymore. This is their public relations. That's what's going on, and I'm not playing that game."


When they get back to the EOC, after Dan Malloy has warned the lowly White House aide just how fraught a comparison he's willing to make, Roy Occhiogrosso rushes to the computer in the long bank of desks that's reserved for the press staff. He taps out the statement, well-spaced, bold lines, the way the governor likes. They're going to make a hard break now. No more Dan Malloy providing cover for CL&P, or taking the federal inaction quietly. They're going to rip them, not just to get their attention, but to create a little light between the governor who's working and the people who are not. Roy's guy is going to sink under this, but he won't if they can show the people watching those briefings and reporting them that the problem is in Washington and the utility executive suites, not in the governor's office. That Dan Malloy is fighting mad, just like them.

And then he doesn't throw the punch. Malloy doesn't criticize CL&P, just warns, again, that he hopes they can make their deadline for restoring power. And the damning comparison he threatened to make -- that Obama's agency is as inept as George W. Bush's -- goes unsaid.

Afterward, they huddle for a few minutes, Bannon, Colleen Flanagan, Nancy Wyman, Malloy. Roy Occhiogrosso calls in from his car, already on the way home. He sounds confused, hurt even, on the speakerphone.

"I don't know why we didn't hit them a little harder," Occhiogrosso says, and it doesn't seem like Malloy himself knows, either. Ask him directly, and he gives the confident smirk, suggests there is a method here, a long play. But that's not it. He wasn't ready to hit them, not like that, not just yet.

Maybe Malloy has already hit them hard enough. Butler, when the storm is over, will swing alone, bounced out of his job days later. And that same night, just after midnight, Tim Bannon relays the word from Bill Hackett: The major disaster declaration has been approved. They'll get their money.
