ONE OF THE MAJESTIC pines at Hall Park couldn’t survive the weekend nor’easter. (Colleen Riley Photo)
Published in the March 5, 2018 edition.
WAKEFIELD — Emergency crews were kept busy for much of the weekend as a mighty nor’easter battered the region Friday and Saturday.
The town saw 1.9 inches of rain fall and about two dozen trees topple, half of which were town-owned. Numerous tree limbs came down and street signs blew over in winds that were sustained at 42 miles an hour for the better part of two days.
DPW Director Richard Stinson reported that while no streets flooded, there was plenty of tree work to do and a lot of debris to be picked up. There was an outage at the Farm Street sewer station which required the splicing of 96 small cables to restore power.
Trees blocked streets all over Wakefield, Stinson said, but the damage caused by the storm here “was not too bad when compared to other communities.”
The Wakefield Municipal Gas & Light Department reported one major power outage this weekend and a bunch of scattered smaller outages as a result of the storm.
The major outage occurred when a large pine tree fell on Oak Street in Greenwood, taking down wires and knocking power out in that section of town for about an hour. According to MGLD General manager Pete Dion, there were a handful of smaller outages around town as a result of trees taking wires down on Friday, but pretty much everyone in town had their power restored by 8 p.m. on Friday.
Dion said that Light Department crews went out on miscellaneous calls on Saturday for tree limbs on wires and other house service calls. He reported that WMGLD also sent a crew to Marblehead on Saturday to assist that community with major outages.
The Fire Department responded to numerous instances of wires down to help secure those scenes until the Light Department and DPW could respond to remove trees and deal with downed electrical wires.
Deputy Police Chief Craig Calabrese commended patrol officers who he said were running from call-to-call related to trees and wires down from about noon to midnight on Friday handling traffic and helping to make those scenes safe while the DPW and Light Department did their work. Calabrese praised the “team effort” among the police, Fire, DPW and Light Department over the weekend to handle the aftereffects of the storm.
Power is slowly being restored in the hardest-hit areas of the East Coast, days after a destructive nor’easter downed trees and power lines, flooded coastal towns and forced a number of school districts to cancel classes — all with another storm forecast for midweek.
Residents from Virginia to Massachusetts faced a massive cleanup Monday following the storm, which was blamed for nine deaths, including two children struck by trees. Utility crews worked around the clock to restore power to the affected areas, as nearly 300,000 struggled without electricity. At the height of the storm, more than 2 million homes and businesses were without electricity.
Three days after the storm, some residents were still unsure when they could return to their homes.
The storm pounded the Eastern Seaboard with a combination of gusting winds, rain and snow, and coastal communities were left to deal with damaging high tide flooding as powerful waves and churning surf pounded shorelines and beachfront homes.
Even as the cleanup is underway, the forecast is for another storm to churn up the coast midweek.
Nearly 100,000 utility customers in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island were still without electricity Monday, and commuter trains continued to experience delays.
Dozens of Massachusetts schools remained closed, most in coastal areas south of Boston, which bore the brunt of the storm.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority was reporting commuter rail delays, particularly along coastal routes still recovering from weather-related problems. The region’s major airports were operating at near normal capacity.
