Date: Fri 01-Mar-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

weather-wind-NU-power-outage

Full Text:

w/photos:The Big Blow: High Winds Take Their Toll On Newtown

B Y K AAREN V ALENTA

Howling winds tore through Newtown last Sunday morning, uprooting trees,

breaking limbs and knocking out power to about 600 homes. Several roads were

blocked by fallen trees until highway department crews were able to clear

them.

Becky and Percy Ferris were in their house on Old Bethel Road when they

suddenly heard cracking sounds made by a tree in their backyard.

"Percy said we should leave so I grabbed the baby and went to a friend's

house," Mrs Ferris said. "The tree fell on the back of the house. Fortunately

my husband is a landscaper so he has the equipment to remove it."

Northeast Utilities, CL&P's parent company, sent out an advisory reporting

that Connecticut's hardest hit areas included most of Hartford County,

Danielson, Newtown, Willimantic, Cheshire and Middletown. Approximately

109,000 CL&P customers lost power on Sunday and another 5,000 in Massachussets

also were affected, making this windstorm the 10th most damaging in the past

23 years, NU said.

"Newtown is a designation for an area that also includes towns like Bethel,

Redding and Brookfield," said CL&P spokesman Margo Jackson-Douglas. "There

were a lot of customers out in that area."

Newtown Highway Director Joe Tani said Flat Swamp, Hattertown and Poverty

Hollow Roads were temporarily blocked by fallen trees.

"I had two men out on Sunday getting the trees off the road," he said. "On

Monday and Tuesday we had a crew with a loader to pick up the big pieces and a

chipper crew out to clean up the brush. Quite a few roads were involved, more

with brush than with fallen trees."

This winter's record snowfall played a role in the damage caused by the

windstorm. The melting snowcover combined with a thaw and resulted in soft

soil which failed to hold some shallow-rooted trees.

Broken limbs falling on power lines also contributed to the damage and a

number of utility poles were uprooted or broke from the stress of the high

winds, NU said. Between 500 and 700 spans of wire were knocked down and as

many as 100 poles must be replaced across the state.

Wires that were knocked down on Platts Hill Road Sunday morning caused a power

outage that lasted until Monday evening for some residents in the Platts

Hill-Arlyn Ridge Road area.

Volunteer firefighters were called out on Sunday and again on Monday for

problems with burning wires in trees along Riverside Road and at Flat Swamp

and Poverty Hollow Roads.

"Our first report of a power outage from Newtown came at 9:30 am Sunday,"

Margo Jackson-douglas said. "The largest outages were in areas like Taunton

Hill Road, Taunton Lane, Poverty Hollow, Platts Hill, Flat Swamp, and Great

Quarter Road in Sandy Hook. But there also were individual outages, where

wires were down between the customer's house and the street."

Bill Jacquemin of the Techni-Weather Center in Danbury said winds gusted up to

60 miles an hour as a high pressure system building over Connecticut met a low

pressure system coming from the Carolinas. "The air pressure flows from high

to low," he said. "The stronger the high, the deepr the low, that's what

causes it."

Mr Jacquemin said that trees might have withstood occasional 60 mph gusts but

the high wind continued for hours.

"It was relentless," he said. "The frequency of gusts in the 50, 55, 60 mph

range was just too much."