“Trees Were Coming Down from Everywhere!”

continued from page 1 was coming down so fast. There were fortytwo inches of snow up top, down here in the Center there were 25-28 inches of snow. There must have been 300 trees down on the roads around town.” Lee said, “I contacted the power company, asking for a hand opening up the roads, and they gave us a crew or two. So we were able to get East-West and Middle Roads opened up. People were driving across wires on the Middle Road until Friday.”

Toward the end of the storm on Tuesday and with so many trees down on the East-West Road, Lee left the town garage on foot with his chain saw, and headed west, cutting up trees as he went. The loader came along behind him clearing the trees off the road. Speaking of his full crew, he said, “We didn’t stop all day long. There were no breaks. We ate a sandwich when we could or drank a glass of water. Some snow storms you can plow around once, then take a fifteen-minute break. But not in this storm. We had to get out of the trucks all the time cutting trees. Or you came to a power line and had to go back. A lot of the trees were fifty feet in the woods and fell, taking out the power lines. It wasn’t a tree-trimming issue for the power company. Trees were coming down from everywhere. There were a lot! They ranged from small to huge.” In trying to recall the sequence of events for me, Lee said, “I wasn’t keeping track of everything. I was just trying to keep up. All the days ran together. It’s hard to remember what happened when.”

Lee emphasized how appreciative he was of all the contractors and residents who voluntarily helped to clear trees. “Everybody who had a saw had it with them in their truck, and some even used equipment to help us open things up. This was a really important help to us.”

Stan Franklin, our post office rural route driver, when asked if the mail got delivered during the storm, replied, “I tried!” On Tuesday, he was able to deliver some packages, but his four-wheel-drive truck broke down, so on Wednesday, of all days, he had to use a two-wheel drive. “I was spinning my tires all the way up Beaver Pond Road to Jelly Mill Hill Road” he recalled, but snapped-off trees prevented any further travel. On the way back down, somebody at the intersection with Stickney Brook told him to not even bother trying to get up there. Trees also blocked Rice Farm Road beyond the parking lot at the top of the West River Trail, as well as Black Mountain and Kipling Roads.

Meanwhile, Green Mountain Power had to have another conference call and get more help. “Once we started dispatching crews, we found there were a lot of trees down on the power lines on major roads, and that was my priority, to get them open,” Don explained. “It took close to thirty-six hours to get the major roads open, and at the same time there were dangers like live wires still down, and wires on top of vehicles, and those were priorities. For the first two days, our primary focus was making things safe.”

A further issue affecting the availability of power in Dummerston was that, “We lost a high voltage 46k line that fed the Dummerston substation from Brattleboro. Then we lost the feed coming out of East Jamaica, which pretty much put the power out for most of Dummerston. We had broken cross arms on poles, and wires on the ground. We actually had crews from VELCO come in and make repairs to those lines. They’re more equipped for working on those transmission lines than we are.”

Back in his four-wheel drive truck on Thursday, Stan could follow a path up Beaver Pond above Jelly Mill Hill, and he was also able to get up Stickney Brook Road by maneuvering around some trees and under some wires, though the wires snagged the light off the top of his truck. “Were the wires live?,” I asked him. “They weren’t sparking,” he replied. Day by day, he kept pushing further into his route, which meant he was going over wires and around trees, to bring us the mail. He went south on Kipling Road, managing to get through at one point by going under a tree whose limbs brushed both side mirrors of his truck. When he finally had to turn back north, he encountered Dan Normandeau, who called him a trailblazer for pushing forward under the tree. Stan responded, “There’s a fine line between brave and foolish and I cross that line a lot of times. But my goal is always to get the mail delivered!”

“I never saw a storm that was that widespread,” Stan said. “It was a spring storm, wet and heavy. It was mostly softwood trees that went down. I saw trucks from Kentucky, Georgia, all over. They were working hard. The power company knew this storm was coming, knew they were going to be in trouble, and they got ready for it. Some people were out of power for four to six hours and some for four to six days. On Rice Farm Road, Peter Doubleday got his power back on Friday, a day ahead of his sister who lives across the road - hers came back on Saturday afternoon. That was an exhausting week.”

As of the second week after the storm, the road crew was still working on storm cleanup. “We’ve pretty much had three people on cleanup since the storm and only one person grading. We haven’t done any road raking. We have another week or two of everyday tree cleanup. I’m hoping to cut down the trees hanging over the East-West Road before we pave it this summer. There’s so much brush from the storm that it will rot instead of us getting around to chip it.”

I also talked to Lee about how downed power lines should be treated. He was concerned that anybody would try to move them or even cross them in a vehicle. We received a photo for this issue of a power line that had been propped up off the road with a forked branch. If the power line had been live, the electricity from the line would have traveled down the branch and electrocuted the person holding it. So, never do this! While the rubber tires of a car may insulate the passengers were the wires to be live, there is also a possibility that the power line could become entangled in the undercarriage of the car, which would cause the passengers to be electrocuted. So, be safe, and never drive across a power line!

Lynn Barrett on Middle Road wrote in about her storm experience: “The storm began Monday evening, and power on Middle Road in the center finally came back on Saturday afternoon, then was on and off on Sunday. So we had no heat of any kind, and no phone, until mid-week. We spent time sitting in the car to charge the cell phone, but there was no internet and no wifi. Finally I went to the Putney Coop on Friday for free wifi. We were lucky that the weather cooperated after and even during the storm…no issues with radiators freezing up, etc. I had many branches down on the property. Hannaford ran out of bottled water; their parking lot was lined with trucks from all over that had come to help. On Thursday, I had to throw out food, a driveway to repair, trees and branches to clean up, and I had to buy new batteries. We do have an emergency radio, but there was no real news about the storm. We could use twenty-four hour news service.”

Frances Herbert on Hill Road was without power for five days, and remembers vividly the convoy of eleven service trucks at the bottom of Stickney Brook Road at 8 a.m. on Friday morning, “ready to tackle the trees and wires. It was a parade We were still wondering with suspense when we would stop burning candles!”

Cliff Adler and Lynn Levine on Partridge continued on page 17