Storm Saves Its Biggest Blow For Newtown

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Newtown resident Don Hammalian, Jr, has spent enough time with friends in Oklahoma to know the basic warning signs of a tornado. So he knew something was up last Friday night when he saw the cushions on his patio furniture fly off into the woods.

The lights inside the Hammalian home at 26 Washbrook Road had already begun to flicker as the wind picked up at around 7:20 that night. Mr Hammalian was headed out to put in his chickens, but thought better of it after seeing the trouble brewing outside. As all hell broke loose, the Newtown man headed for the basement.

“The rain was almost deafening and with the wind, I was sure it was a tornado,” he recalled this week.

Less than 10 minutes later, much of the storm had passed, allowing the Newtown man to survey the damage. Fortunately, his chickens survived the wind – as they sought shelter in their coup – but nine trees on his property did not. Like fallen soldiers, the trees littered the property – an unmistakable reminder of nature’s fury.

“Within a two acre area we probably have 30 to 35 trees down,” Mr Hammalian said.

Friday’s storm that tore its way through different sections of town was something other than a tornado, according to Mike Ferrara of the Western Connecticut State University weather center, who defined it as a microburst brought on by a down draft of wind. But Tina Griesse still wonders. The Brookwood Drive resident, who used to live in the Midwest, says that Friday’s conditions were tornadic in her mind. Her home lies in Dodgingtown, an area of town hit extremely hard by the storm. So was Botsford, where Mr Hammalian lives, as were numerous other areas.

The storm put up some impressive statistics:

Ÿ 7,800 homes left without power, according to CL&P

Ÿ more than 70 emergency services calls (fire, police, ambulance)

Ÿ 70 utility poles downed or damaged

Ÿ numerous road closings, including Routes 25 and 35

“Without a doubt, Newtown was probably one of the worse hit towns,” noted Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P) spokesperson Terrence McIntosh Monday morning.

 

A War Zone

Fred Hurley of the Public Works Department said Newtown reminded him of a war zone Friday night. Highway crews were quickly dispatched to trouble areas. Police, fire, and ambulance personnel also shifted into high gear.

Town firefighters responded to almost 70 calls for help during the storm and the following day, as storm-related damage continued to occur and be noticed. Between 7:30 and 9 pm alone June 2, firefighters responded to 47 calls for help. Most calls involved utility wires downed by falling trees.

Sandy Hook Fire Chief Bill Halstead said Sandy Hook firefighters went on 32 calls during the storm and after it. Most calls involved wires down and trees down, he said. Sandy Hook firemen went to Newtown High School on their first call at 7:31 pm for a malfunctioning alarm system. The alarm malfunction, plus a water leak through the school auditorium roof, prompted fire officials to end a concert in progress at the school.

The worst part of the storm lasted only a few minutes, Chief Halstead said, adding that Sandy Hook firefighters had no serious storm-related calls. He said he is unaware of any injuries caused by the storm.

The June 2 storm generated more calls for help in Sandy Hook than any storm since Hurricane Gloria in 1985, Chief Halstead said. 

 Newtown Ladder Fire Chief Dave Ober said the storm caused a tree to fall onto a house at 151 Hanover Road. Three people inside the house were startled by the impact, he said. The tree fell either due to high winds or lightning, he said. The impact caused moderate property damage.

 “We had wires down all over the place,” he said. Hook and Ladder went on about a dozen storm-related calls. For a short-duration storm, it was one of the worst storms in the last several years, he said.

Botsford Fire Chief Steve Belair and Botsford firemen were quite busy during the storm.

Downed wires on South Main Street near Sand Hill Plaza caused that major road to close to traffic for more than 12 hours starting at about 8 pm Friday. South Main Street was closed from Cold Spring Road to Orchard Hill Road, Chief Belair said. Motorists were detoured along side streets, mainly Huntingtown Road.

Also, falling trees hit houses at 265 and 277 South Main Street (near Leo’s Restaurant), he said.

Chief Belair said he cannot recall ever having had 16 calls for help come in within an hour, as happened June 2.

For its part, Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P) was stretched to the limit during Friday night’s storm. According to CL&P Spokesperson Terrence McIntosh, phone calls started coming in as early as 7:30 Friday night, not only from residents upset about interrupted service, but from Newtown police reporting downed poles and wires strewn across streets.

In general, Connecticut was hit hard by the tempest, with 68,000 households losing power. CL&P dispatched its full (reserve of) trucks to all corners of the state, even calling on crews from Massachusetts and New Hampshire to help out.

It became clear Monday morning, as CL&P officials continued to assess damage in the storm’s aftermath, that Newtown was one of the worst hit towns in the state. “There were a lot of outages,” Mr McIntosh confirmed early this week. “In Newtown in particular, there were approximately 70 [telephone poles] that went down. That’s significant. It’s significant in terms of physical damage, and it was significant in the number of customers that were without service.”

Mr McIntosh estimated that approximately 7,800 Newtown households lost power at some point due to Friday night’s storm, with most of these households remaining without power for much of the day Saturday.

By Monday, the last 30 homes had their power restored.

First Selectman Herb Rosenthal said a shelter was opened at the middle school over the weekend with a handful of people taking advantage of the facility.

Newtown Left To

Clean Up

In the cool, washed air of Saturday morning, under blue skies, the din of chainsaws resonated down Brookwood Drive.

Trees thwarted traffic in two places along that horseshoe-shaped road, where most properties suffered landscape damage and all homes lost power. Ed Leighton and other Brookwood Drive residents took to the streets as the storm abated in an effort to saw and remove felled trees, work that continued as the rest of Newtown woke up to survey the storm’s damages.

Mr Leighton’s work after the storm was not limited to cleanup. One of his neighbors, Beth Herring, had a tree blocking the entrance into her garage, and with her husband out of town, had no way of getting into her house. Mr Leighton managed to climb up and into her second story window in order unlock the front door and let her into her home.

“We had quite an adventure,” recalls Mr Leighton’s wife, Andrea, of Friday night’s bizarre weather. “Thank God no one was hurt.”

Jeff Brede, a resident of Abbotts Hill Road, suffered severe property damage due to the storm. Priding himself on a property rich with trees, he was disheartened to wake up and survey his losses: one sugar maple, two swamp maples, two poplar trees, four more partially uprooted swamp maples, and a stately, 30-foot maple.

Throughout most of this week, highway department workers converged on Mr Brede’s property to aid in the clearing.

Homeowners plying front lawns collecting branches, sweeping sidewalks, and peeling sticky green leaves off garage doors were a common site throughout town last weekend, as Highway Department employees under the direction Fred Hurley attacked the larger projects of clearing clogged roads and dealing with downed wires.

“We had over 30 locations that we were working on,” Mr Hurley explained this week. “Two-thirds of them we cleared. The rest could not be finished until Sunday night due to live wires.”

Mr Hurley said that workers toiled through nights at some of the hardest hit areas, like Taunton Hill Road, Route 302, and a section of Route 25 that was closed for 13 hours Friday night into Saturday morning.

Town clean-up efforts notwithstanding, many residents around Newtown were left with an impression that the highway department and CL&P did not respond quickly enough. Citing trees and black wires that still littered the streets Saturday afternoon around Boggs Hill and Poverty Hallow Roads, Tina Griesse wondered what was taking clean-up crews so long.

“The thing that bothered me was that we were out and about on Saturday and we didn’t see anybody out doing anything,” she said. “I talked to CL&P people, but didn’t see a CL&P truck until Sunday afternoon.”

CL&P said it responded to the situation as best it could, given the conditions. “When you’re dealing with that kind of physical damage, that’s a lot of work,” Mr McIntosh, the spokesman, explained. “It wasn’t branches coming down, we’re talking whole trees. There was a lot of work that had to be done to get our equipment up to speed and our customers back on.”

For Fred Hurley, the town was just lucky it came away from the storm with just property and structure damaged. It could have been worse. “[It was a] real miracle nobody got killed in town.” Nevertheless, he too was discouraged by the lack of coordination in clearing power lines.

“The biggest problem was getting coordination out of CL&P for where they wanted us or where we could go,” he said this week. “We had resources to do things, but we couldn’t always be as efficient as we’d like to be due to wires. This was a relatively small storm in relation to a hurricane. We had more problems than we should have had for such a small storm.”

 

Coping With Storm Brings People Together

With diversions such as televisions, video games, and radios out of commission in many parts of Newtown throughout much of last weekend, family members looked to each other to pass the time.

As her home flickered with candlelight Friday and Saturday nights, Tina Griesse remembered what her parents used to do when she was young and her house lost power. So, she gathered her family together and played cards through the night, until her power was restored early Sunday morning.

Andrea Leighton’s son had a friend over, so the two kept each other amused with a battery operated Gameboy, while Mrs Leighton and the rest of her family sat around a table and played board games.

The beautiful weather during Saturday and Sunday allowed many families to take out their bikes or escape to outside parks for the day.

Although Friday night’s storm wreaked havoc on his property, Jeff Brede is quick to point out that it had a good side to it: people who were strangers to each other were brought together by the binding power of circumstance. Being the only one on his road who had a power generator, Mr Brede opened his home to outsiders, fired it up, and cooked food. “These were people I had never met before who were stranded,” he explained.

“You get to meet your neighbors,” Mrs Leighton explained. “People come out and see what’s going on and they try to help each other. We met people from our streets and other streets, so that was nice.”

In the Leightons’ case, one of those people was Beth Herring, their neighbor whom they had never met. Thanks to Mr Leighton’s efforts in helping her into her home that stormy night, Mrs Herring gave him a box of golf balls in gratitude.

(This story was reported and written by Steve Bigham, Andrew Gorosko, and Jeff White.)