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The Westfield News Serving Westfield, Southwick, and the surrounding Hilltowns
www.thewestfieldnews.com WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2015
VOL. 84 NO. 025
See Arrest, Page 8
— Henny Youngman
75 cents
Blizzardstricken dig out
Westfield man arrested for biting officer, assaulting girlfriend By CARL E. HARTDEGEN Staff Writer WESTFIELD – A city man is behind bars after he allegedly bit a police officer Saturday night. City police were summoned to a Frederick Street apartment about 10:30 p.m. Saturday and a resident there told them that her boyfriend had assaulted her. The woman told Officer Sean Smith that she and her boyfriend of seven years had been arguing all day about relationship issues. She said that she went to bed but her boyfriend, Michael Stephens, 37, of 3 Frederick St., wasn’t willing to let the argument go and went upstairs to continue the argument. In the bedroom, she said, Stephens picked up a 24” flat screen television and threw it at her while she was in bed. Smith reports that a witness “overheard the argument, heard a crash and heard the victim yelling that the Defendant had thrown a TV at her.” The television struck the woman’s leg, Smith reports, and was damaged. He reports that the television belonged to the victim. Stephens was arrested for assault and battery on a family or household member, for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (a television) and for vandalizing property. Smith reports that, while Officer Richard Mazza was attempting to emplace a seat belt on Stephens in a cruiser, Stephens “bit an officer on his
“A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student.”
Frozen sea spray coats a road sign and a church during a winter storm in Marshfield yesterday. The storm punched out a section of the seawall in the coastal town, police said. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
City spared, WMECO aids in state recovery By PETER FRANCIS Staff Writer WESTFIELD – Superstorm Juno didn’t quite live up to the advanced billing here and Westfield Emergency Management Director James Wiggs said that the city was in good shape yesterday afternoon. He attributed that to the cooperation of residents of city departments in handling the storm. “We had a conference call this morning and it was all quiet with police and fire in the city. The DPW is doing one helluva job on the roads,” Wiggs said yesterday. “People stayed off the roads and people weren’t out there doing anything stupid.” “For a storm of this size,” he said. “It wasn’t as bad as it could have been if it was an icy snow.” “Nothing has been going on with Public Health. We didn’t have to open the shelter,” said Wiggs, adding that the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts has over 8,600 beds in rescue shelters around the state and that only 142 people were occupying those shelters as of last night. JIM WIGGS
See WMECO, Page 8
By BOB SALSBERG and WILLIAM J. KOLE Associated Press BOSTON (AP) — New Englanders savaged by a blizzard packing knee-high snowfall and hurricaneforce winds began digging out as New Yorkers and others spared its full fury questioned whether forecasts were overblown. The storm buried the Boston area in more than 2 feet of snow and lashed it with howling winds that exceeded 70 mph. It punched a gaping hole in a seawall and swamped a vacant home in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and flipped a 110-foot replica of a Revolutionary War ship in Newport, Rhode Island, snapping its mast and puncturing its hull. “I had to jump out the window because the door only opens one way,” Chuck Beliveau said in the hard-hit central Massachusetts town of Westborough. “I felt like a kid again. When I was a kid, we’d burrow through snow drifts like moles.” But signs of normalcy emerged: Boston’s public transit was running Wednesday, and Amtrak trains to New York and Washington were rolling on a limited schedule. Flights began arriving at Logan International Airport, among the nation’s busiest air hubs, just after 8 a.m. Bitter cold threatened to complicate efforts to clear clogged streets and restore power to more than 15,000 customers shivering in the dark, including the entire island of Nantucket. A 78 mph wind gust was reported there, and a 72 mph one on neighboring Martha’s Vineyard. The low in Boston on Wednesday was expected to be 10 degrees, with a wind chill of minus 5. Forecasters warned that it won’t get above freezing for a week. The Philadelphia-to-Boston corridor of more than 35 million people had braced for a paralyzing blast Monday evening and into Tuesday after forecasters See Dig Out, Page 8
Noble Emergency Management prepared By PETER FRANCIS Staff Writer WESTFIELD – Superstorm Juno passed through Westfield with relatively little fanfare yesterday but forecasters are predicting cold temperatures tonight dropping close to zero if not slightly below, and the chance for more snow late Thursday night into Friday. Being prepared for cold weather is the business of Bruce Bussiere, manager of emergency management and security operations for Noble Hospital, and knowing the symptoms of conditions such as hypothermia is critical. “Hypothermia can set on quick if you have any exposed skin, so make sure you stay covered up,” said Bussiere, adding that victims will feel numbing in their extremities. “Keep gloves on for a couple minutes at a time and if you find you have no gloves, one of the remedies is to put your hands in your armpits or crotch area to keep warm.” Bussiere said that during extremely cold winter storms when power outages occur people will sometimes call 911 just to be taken to a warm place. “One of the things the state has done since 2011 is to grant waivers through Emergency Management that, if you get picked
up by an ambulance, you can get taken to a shelter,” he said, which saves the hospital’s resources for those requiring other ER services. Bussiere advises anyone who thinks they have symptoms of hypothermia to call 911. “If someone needs to be here and they’re in trouble somewhere, we want make sure to do everything we can to help protect them and firefighters, police and paramedics all do the same,” he said. Noble Hospital employs the use of numerous generators during widespread power outages. “We’re kind of like the beacon in the night,” he said. “We have a dietary system and a state-of-the-art kitchen here and part of our emergency planning and staffing plan is to have staff to run the kitchen.” Bussiere stated that, as of 4 p.m. Monday afternoon, Noble’s Command Center had opened with three dietary staffers on call during the night and that it had stocked up on food and fuel for its boilers and generators to prepare for the storm. “All Monday morning was spent running around making sure all of those pieces were tied up and to go from there,” he said.
Gov. Baker to visit blizzard-damaged towns BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is scheduled to visit some of the areas hit hardest by the two-day blizzard that left up to three feet of snow in some communities. After stopping by the state Transportation Department operations center in Boston on Wednesday morning, Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito are expected to head to the South Shore town of Scituate (SITCH’-oo-it). There they will meet with town officials at town offices at 12:30 p.m. to discuss the storm’s impact. The seaside town regularly suffers from coastal flooding during major storms. The governor and lieutenant governor are also scheduled to visit neighboring Marshfield, where a 50-foot section of seawall was washed away in the Green Harbor neighborhood, damaging a vacant home. That meeting with town officials is scheduled for 2 p.m.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, right, speaks next to Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito during a news conference at the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency office, Monday, in Framingham, Mass. (AP Photo/The Metro West Daily News, Allan Jung)
Phyllis Brent clears a path so the mailman can reach her home, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015, in Norwood, Mass., after a winter snowstorm slammed New England on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)