Powerless in the Hilltowns: Worst ice storm in 30 years
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Utility companies track storms for days before they hit, but the severity of the ice storm that arrived in New England on Thursday and Friday widely exceeded expectations.
Now, they will need to rebuild the electricity-delivery system essentially from scratch, according to a spokesman for one of the utilities serving the area.
"In the electrical industry, there is probably no event that is as devastating or damaging as an ice storm," Al Lara, the spokesman for Northeast Utilities, said Sunday.
"In a lot of these areas, you are looking at probably a complete rebuilding of the infrastructure from the ground up. You're talking about replacing whole miles of poles."
In the meantime, an estimated 11,541 people in western Massachusetts served by two major utilities are without power.
As of noon Sunday, 95 Western Massachusetts Electric Co. crews of two to three workers were on the job, as well as tree crews and trouble-shooters. Help was arriving from around New England as well.
"For the most part, most customers will have their power back by Monday night, but there will still be a substantial number whose power will be out for probably several more days. (With) the amount of damage and the conditions that exist, there will be folks who may be out for the rest of this week," Lara said.
Very bad
"I don't think anybody knew it would be anywhere near this bad," he said. "This is probably the worst storm most of our field people have ever seen."
Lara called it the most severe ice storm in 30 years. Others interviewed Sunday say the storm has no peer in recent memory.
National Grid's workforce, meantime, was the largest that company - which provides power to Goshen, Northampton and Ware in Hampshire County, along with Shutesbury in Franklin County - had ever assembled in the state.
"In a situation such as what we have going on in this storm, which is pretty unprecedented for us, we have an army of people working to restore services," said the utility's spokeswoman, Jackie Barry.
A peak of 294,000 National Grid customers in the state lost power, some 5,000 of whom live in western Massachusetts. By 9 p.m. on Sunday, some 100,000 customers in the state, 1,100 in western Massachusetts, still lacked power from National Grid.
"So we've basically restored two-thirds of customers in Massachusetts that were affected," Barry said.
For Western Massachusetts Electric, 10,441 customers still lacked power in the four western counties as of 10:05 p.m. Sunday. The numbers by county: Berkshire: 4,980; Franklin, 1,784; Hampden, 1,502; and Hampshire, 2,175.
By design, crews work on the main lines and facilities that serve large number of customers first, as well as public safety buildings, hospitals and nursing homes.
Utilities were expecting aid from crews from Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
'Cut and clear'
Bernard Forgea, Cummington's fire chief and a 38-year veteran of work with Western Massachusetts Electric Co., said the storm presents the utility with a massive challenge. "It's the biggest thing we've had around here," he said, speaking of weather-related damage to power lines.
"They've got to set new poles, new transformers," said Forgea who no longer works for the utility.
The company was unloading supplies for that task at its Cummington Service Center site. "It's a massive amount - and I'm not sure they had enough," Forgea said Sunday.
Early on, the utility decided to "cut and clear," a policy that involves removing downed wires entirely, rather than working to restring individual lines, Forgea said. "They are reconstructing and rebuilding, brand new."
There is no competition among utilities when it comes to mutual aid, Lara said. "Mutual aid assistance is a long and honored tradition of offering help when it is needed."
Towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties experienced different effects from the storm, with low-lying communities for the most part escaping the brunt of it.
"You could have one town where there is no damage whatsoever and a few miles down the road and a couple of hundred feet higher in elevation and everything is covered in ice," Lara said.
"When a tree takes down a line, it will pull down a pole, because everything is frozen on contact, everything shatters. Poles snap in half and break clear."
Hardest hit
Shutesbury was among the hardest-hit communities locally.
By Sunday, 20 National Guard members from Cambridge were helping to clear roads there along with Fire Chief Walter Tibbetts, police, Department of Conservation and Recreation and others so electrical crews could get in.
Tibbetts' first call came in after 11 p.m. on Thursday. A power line had fallen on a car on Montague Road. It took at least 45 minutes to gain access to it, Tibbetts said, because firefighters had to use chainsaws to get to the car.
The fire engine got stuck in the mud along the way, so the crew responded in a brush truck.
"Trees down, power lines down, telephone poles across the road. It looked like a war zone and it sounded like one, too," as trees and branches crashed down about every 30 seconds, Tibbetts said.
After several electrical explosions in front of the firehouse early Friday, the power went off until Sunday.
"I haven't seen anything on TV or heard anything since Thursday," Tibbetts said. He hadn't even cleaned up the dozen or so trees that had fallen in his own yard.
National Grid was starting to restore power by Sunday night but some outlying sections of town wouldn't come back online for days.
"Not to pat ourselves on the back, but a lot of their ability to get in was because the local crews were able to clear the road. I can't say enough for all the people who came out and then there's a whole group of volunteers that's been getting together and feeding the crews," Tibbetts said.
The utility asks customers "just to hang tight and eventually the repairs will get to them," Lara said, adding, "the last message I have to give to people is safety. If they haven't reported an outage yet, they should report it. Don't make an assumption that we are aware of the outage."
Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.
