Surprise Storm Rips Through Town;

Power Outages, Heavy Damage Left Behind

By Andrew Gorosko

A severe thunderstorm with high winds and lightning swept through Newtown late Wednesday afternoon, causing extensive damage and cutting power to almost 70 percent of local electric customers.

Fallen trees brought down utility lines and blocked dozens of local roads during the evening rush, resulting in extensive travel delays throughout town.

The town activated its Code Red emergency notification system, which placed automated telephone calls to town residents making them aware of the hazards posed by the storm damage. Newtown Middle School was opened as an emergency shelter, where one family took cover.

Schools were closed on Thursday in view of extensive local power outages and many blocked roads, which would have required extensive school bus detours.

At least one volunteer firefighter received minor injuries in the course of responding to an emergency.

Connecticut Light & Power Company (CL&P) spokesman Mitch Gross said that at 9:30 pm Wednesday, approximately 7,350 CL&P customers in Newtown were without electricity. That number had dropped to 4,860 outages by 8:30 am Thursday, as CL&P crews worked to restore power. CL&P has 10,788 local customers.

CL&P set up a staging area for its work crews at Fairfield Hills. Utility crews from New Hampshire were being called in to help repair the electrical damage, as were private contractors, he said.

“That is such a high level of damage…That was high wind, fast and furious…I think a lot of people are just staying home and cleaning up,” Mr Gross said Thursday morning.

Mr Gross said CL&P is working to restore all power locally by sometime on Friday, May 11.

Town Public Works Director Fred Hurley said, “It was bad and it was dangerous. You had telephone poles snapping. You had trees snapping … This was a hit. This was a freak storm.”

Mr Hurley estimated that at the height of road blockages on Wednesday evening, several dozen local roads were closed to through-traffic.

Public works crews worked through the night to clean up storm-related damage, he said. The crews sought to clear blocked roads to make them passable for fire trucks, he said. Public works crews removed fallen trees from local roads after CL&P crews removed the fallen electrical lines from among those trees, he said.

The heaviest damage from the storm appeared to occur along a line tracking from southwest to northeast, extending from Poverty Hollow Road to Key Rock Road to Boggs Hill Road to Brushy Hill Road to South Main Street to Toddy Hill Road to Berkshire Road.

Dodgingtown Fire Captain Joe Masso said that two houses in the Dodgingtown fire district were struck by falling trees. The houses are located on Key Rock Road and Purdy Station Road, he said. In both cases, the trees struck the houses’ roofs, causing “substantial damage,” he said. There were no injuries, he said.

Due to the many road closures, firefighters had difficulty in reaching fire calls, noting that the closure of a section of Route 302 caused serious accessibility problems in that part of town, he said.

Police Sergeant Christopher Vanghele said Thursday morning that police received 53 calls from the public stemming from storm-related problems.

Some motor vehicle accidents occurred at intersections after traffic signals stopped working after power outages, he said. The sergeant estimated that traffic on about 100 local roads was adversely affected by the storm.

Sgt Vanghele said the thunderstorm was the most disruptive storm he has seen in his 14 years as a police officer. The southwestern section of town appeared to receive the heaviest damage in the storm, he said.

In the aftermath of the storm, many motorists sought alternate routes to avoid heavy traffic on major roads. In seeking detours, they repeatedly found that many secondary roads were blocked by fallen trees, making for a very long evening commute. One local resident who normally has a ten-minute drive home from work found that it took her two hours to get home Wednesday evening.

While driving back to Newtown from Trumbull just after the storm system passed around 4:15 pm, Newtown Bee Associate Editor John Voket observed an extreme level of damage, including trees felled in long rows, some into buildings, and one branch speared through the cab of a commercial vehicle along Route 25 in Monroe. After crossing into Newtown, Mr Voket attempted to expedite his trip to The Bee’s office on Church Hill Road through Botsford, Hattertown, and Dodgingtown, but due to an unprecedented number of trees and wires across roadways, that detour took nearly two hours.

During his travel, he observed at least three incidents of drivers or residents armed with chainsaws attempting to clear smaller road blockages. In all three cases vehicles that subsequently passed through were stopped or turned back by road closings further on. His difficult travels in trying to get across town mirrored those of countless others who were trying to make their way home Wednesday evening.

Pushing The Envelope

At about 6:30 pm, First Selectman Herb Rosenthal joined town Emergency Management Director William Halstead and Assistant Director Donna Culbert at the town’s emergency command center in the Sandy Hook Fire & Rescue Co. headquarters. During the ensuing 90 minutes the almost constant emergency dispatch chatter slowly returned to nearly normal.

During that period, firefighters at that department were still responding to downed wires calls, and had utilized all emergency cones and road closed signage by about 7:45 pm. The first selectman and emergency management officials said that this storm and a previous storm that caused numerous flooding incidents a few weeks ago had pushed the envelope on systems designed to respond to and address public safety concerns.

While thankful neither storm resulted in any serious injuries, Wednesday’s event did shed light on several minor issues that will now be addressed. Mr Rosenthal believes that on a small scale, the two storm incidents will end up improving the overall scope of disaster response coordination among multiple agencies and jurisdictions.

Mr Rosenthal praised utility crews who subsequently restored power to about half the local homes that were effected by early Thursday morning, as well as town highway crews who followed utility workers, clearing roadways of fallen trees once wires were removed or disconnected from the power supply. The town has hired private tree companies to aid it remove fallen trees from the roads, he added.

The greatest criticism came as a result of utility crews who were called to respond to an incident near 45 Toddy Hill Road in which four occupants were trapped, uninjured, in a car that was struck by a falling tree and wires. The occupants, according to Mr Halstead, were made to wait more than one hour before a utility crew arrived.

That responding crew apparently was not informed about occupants inside the vehicle to be freed, or may have been delayed by blocked roads like many other drivers, he said. An investigation into that response concern will be completed in the coming days.

Supplemental tree services were also called in and began working alongside town crews almost immediately after the storm had passed, the first selectman said.

An initial attempt to send a Code Red notifying message from the command center via the Internet was stymied because personnel could not access the web. A back-up system at the main local dispatch center was able to access the system, however, and the first Code Red message was delivered to subscribers within about ten minutes.

Within the Code Red message residents were urged to remain in their homes and off town roads unless absolutely necessary.

“Due to this afternoon’s storm … widespread damage and power outages, it may be hours or days until power is fully restored. Please be patient as emergency services respond to the highest priorities first,” the recording said. “Please use extreme caution as wires are down and may be energized.”

Cellphone service was also compromised for much of the evening, presumably because of the volume of callers who had no hardwired service at their homes. Walkie-talkie service on Nextel phones being used by local emergency services and hardwired phones at the Sandy Hook headquarters continued operating without issue.

Mr Rosenthal also lamented one aspect of interjurisdictional communication among leaders of other neighboring communities. He said a disaster communication system that was funded more than four years ago, but not yet activated, would provide all town leaders in the regional Council of Governments the ability to interact with audio and video feeds in real time.

“That way if several towns are hard-hit and other are not, like in this storm, we could all get together in a virtual video conference to decide on the most effective use of mutual aid resources,” Mr Rosenthal said. He was hopeful that system will be in place and operational shortly.

Falling Trees Everywhere

In addition to the many trees that fell onto utility lines, firefighters received several reports of trees falling onto houses.

Between 4:08 and 10:46 pm on Wednesday, the five local volunteer fire companies responded to a total of 80 fire calls, the vast majority of which were storm-related. 

Chief Halstead said a tree fell onto a pickup truck on Route 34, near Johnny Appleseed Lane. The man who was in the truck, Sandy Hook resident Greg Peters, escaped.

Mr Peters told The Bee he was driving home from work at roughly 4:30 pm when the sky darkened, the wind intensified, and severe rain abruptly began falling. As Mr Peters rounded the bend on Route 34 just past Zoar Cemetery, a tall spruce tree crashed onto the 2007 Chevy Silverado 2500 that he was driving. He had made it out of the driver’s side safely, and explained what had happened.

“I was just traveling with traffic and a gust came, and I saw the tree coming. I hit the brakes, but it was right there,” he said. “It just uprooted. I’ve got some bad luck following me.”

Standing on a nearby front lawn with Cindy and Bob Rice, who live one house away from the accident, Mr Peters clutched a flannel blanket around his shoulders and looked up the road to where the tree completely blocked the street. Underneath the tree, his crushed vehicle was barely visible.

Only the equipment trailer hitched to the back stuck out from beneath the limbs. As the tree fell it downed utility wires and a telephone pole.

On nearby Toddy Hill Road, near Sugarloaf Road, four people were trapped inside a minivan for about two hours after a tree that was entangled with utility lines had fallen onto their vehicle. They were removed from the vehicle without injury by firefighters after a CL&P crew arrived to cut off the electricity in the area, Chief Halstead said.

“Every fire company was out [on calls] and very busy…The [fire] tones just kept on going and going and going,” he said.

While firefighters were working on one call, they were approached by passersby who directed them to another problem in another area, he noted.

Emergency personnel were also stymied many times when, while responding to one call of trees and/or wires down, even they found themselves unable to pass over town roads blocked by trees and wires.

Sandy Hook firefighters needed to take detours to reach their first several storm-related calls after a tree had fallen across Riverside Road near their firehouse, he said.

“It was one of the worst storms I’ve seen because it hit all over … This time there were calls all over town,” he said.

First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal said that about 35 local roads were closed to traffic on Wednesday evening. By 9 am Thursday, about 11 roads remained partially or fully closed, including Hanover Road, Key Rock Road, and Brushy Hill Road, he said.

Caroline Reed, who lives on John Beach Road, was still stuck at her house when she discovered that both ends of her road were blocked by trees that had fallen and had pulled wires down along with them. John Beach is a horseshoe, so residents were going to be kept on their road until CL&P crews could safely remove the wires from the trees. Only after the wires had been safely removed could tree crews begin cutting the trees apart to open the road. Similar scenes were playing out across town from the time the storm hit on Wednesday until well into Thursday as The Bee was going to press.

“I’ve never seen wind like that,” Mrs Reed said. “It was moving chairs around on the deck, it was very scary. I’ve never seen a hurricane, but this must have been close.”

Other residents had harrowing experiences on their property.

Tina and Rod Poster were in the back of their house on Key Rock Road Wednesday afternoon, in the TV room, when all of a sudden “a sheet of rain came, and then this terrific wind, and the bow window in the front of the house seemed to pop out and down came a tree,” Mr Poster said. After that, he said, trees seemed to “start falling down all over the place.”

One of those trees landed on one corner of their home, destroying the living room. Support beams landed on the back of a couch that had been in front of a window facing the road, and debris from the ceiling and attic dropped into the room. Insulation, part of the air conditioning system, and supporting beams all fell into the living room.

To their amazement, however, a wall shelf in the living room filled with ceramic figurines managed to escape the crashing tree.

The couple was waiting for their insurance adjuster on Thursday, before they moved forward with repair plans. They plan to put a large tarp over the roof due to forecasted rains, and will go about getting their home back in order. The house is 35 years old, and they have lived there for 33 years.

“Life goes on,” said Mrs Poster.

Jeannette DelVento, who lives at 154 Huntington Road, had a tree fall in her backyard and land on her deck. The tree, which was at least 30 feet tall, and managed to fall between two cedar trees, which broke the fall of the tall spruce, before landing on the deck.

Incredibly, the tree missed a nearby statue of St Francis.

“The tree landed just shy of that statue,” Mrs DelVento said Thursday morning. “It’s amazing. Just a few feet to the side and it would have been hit, but this morning it doesn’t have a scratch on it.

“It’s incredible. The tree pulled the entire root system right out of the ground,” she said.

As The Bee approached deadline Thursday morning, fire crews were still being dispatched to newly discovered cases of storm-related damage.

Pizza Palace on Church Hill Road was in good shape as the storm ended Wednesday. Employees continued to fill dozens of orders as kitchen staff worked with oil lamps and flashlights, cooking with gas appliances.

Neighboring business Newtown Hardware was also ready for the storm. Manager Joe Summo said batteries and lamp oil have been popular purchases, and as recently as Thursday morning he said, “It’s still happening, people are still without power.”

Despite the rush for the batteries and lamp oil, the store was not in danger of running out of supplies. In fact, Newtown Hardware was ready for the emergency even before the sky darkened and the first rumbles of thunder sounded Wednesday afternoon.

“We have extra lamp oil and batteries for occasions like this,” Mr Summo said. “We have been ever since the 1980s when we lost power for a few days.”

Additional reporting for this story came from Kendra Bobowick, Shannon Hicks, Scudder Smith, and John Voket.