Storm tears up Valley, leaving thousands without power; possible 'microburst' touches down in Hadley
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A line of rapidly moving, intense thunderstorms hammered western Massachusetts overnight Wednesday, spurring a possible microburst in Hadley and causing several Pioneer Valley towns to declare states of emergency.
More than 100 utility crews and about 50 tree-removal teams fanned out across western Massachusetts on Thursday to start restoring power and cleaning up.
Tens of thousands of customers in Massachusetts lost power because of the storms, which prompted several communities to keep schoolchildren at home Thursday, including Amherst, Leverett, Pelham, Shutesbury and Granby.
Western Massachusetts Electric Co., which reported about 17,000 customers still without power Thursday evening, said there was no timetable for restoring power. She compared damage to a December 2008 ice storm that kept some people without electricity for several days. National Grid reported about 3,000 outages in Massachusetts.
"Mother Nature threw us a curve ball," WMECO spokeswoman Lacey Ryan said.
Winds gusting up to 70 mph, 1-inch hail and lightning brought down trees and power lines and damaged utility poles just a day after record-setting high temperatures.
The towns of Amherst, Ware, Shelburne, Leverett, Bernardston, Gill, Greenfield, Montague and Colrain declared emergencies. There were no reports of serious injuries.
According to ABC40 meteorologist Ed Carroll, Wednesday night's storm system was the result of a "back-door cold front," meaning that, rather than moving across the state from west to east, the thunderstorm originated northeast of the Valley and moved southwest across the region.
"The problem is that when these storms come through the Northeast, we have a lot of very high, very large trees, and when they come down they take a lot of power lines with them," Carroll said.
Microburst in Hadley?
The storm included what might have been a microburst on Middle Street in Hadley, where there were numerous downed trees, closed roads and power cuts, said Town Administrator David Nixon. A microburst is a column of sinking air that lasts only a few seconds but produces dangerous winds at the surface. A microburst in Sunderland was blamed for widespread damage in a storm on July 20, 2008.
Nixon said there was no evidence of a tornado.
At midday, more than a thousand WMECO customers in Hadley were without power because of trees falling on electric lines. There were six partial road closures because of the downed trees and power lines: Old Bay, Moody Bridge, East Hadley, Breckenridge, and Old Farm roads, and Newton Lane, Nixon said.
"It will take several days to clean up the damage," he said, noting that fire and road crews were out since midnight working to repair the damage.
Woman trapped in Granby
Granby was one of the hardest-hit towns. At about 11:45 p.m., a woman on Forge Pond Road suffered lacerations and was taken to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield after a large oak tree came crashing through her roof, pinning her to her bed, said Granby Police Chief Louis Barry.
A car was also crushed by the tree, he said. The woman's name and further details were not released by police.
Easton and Lyman streets remained closed through Thursday afternoon, said Highway Superintendent David Desrosiers.
"We've been going for 12 hours straight," said Desrosiers, who was in the midst of cleanup efforts when he was reached on his cell phone around 1 p.m. Thursday. "When we were first called in last night, there were more roads that were impassable than passable. It was bad."
Route 202 was closed for three hours, between midnight and 3 a.m., Desrosiers said.
Amherst
Shortly after midnight, decision makers from Amherst's Town Hall and the Fire, Police and Public Works departments opened the emergency operations center to centralize the command for the town, Fire Chief W. Tim Nelson said.
Town Manager Larry Shaffer said he arrived at the center shortly after midnight when he was notified that at least 20 roads in Amherst were closed because of fallen trees and wires.
Power failures were widespread and live wires were reported on Main, North Whitney and South East streets, with the wire down on Main Street causing damage to the pavement. Other fallen wires sparked small brush fires that had to be extinguished. Parts of Main and Dickinson streets, Bay, Montague and January Hills roads and several smaller streets were closed to traffic while trees and lines were cleared.
Although 2,800 Amherst customers remained without power early Thursday afternoon, most roads were passable.
Public Works Superintendent Guilford Mooring said his employees removed both public and private trees that had fallen into the roads. "This is the best storm we've had in a long time," Mooring said. He said he hoped to have all roads open by nightfall Thursday.
The falling trees also posed dangers to people using the roads. At 11:50 p.m. Wednesday, a man riding his motorcycle on Sunderland Road suffered minor injuries when a tree fell on him near the Harp restaurant. The man, whom police didn't identify, was taken by ambulance to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton for treatment.
A motorcycle on Main Street was found crushed beneath a fallen tree Thursday at 6:40 a.m., but no one was injured in that incident.
Downed limbs in Northampton
Northampton public works crews and police were busy responding to a flurry of downed trees and limbs throughout the night and early Thursday, some of which damaged property, compromised utility lines, and forced temporary road closures. A power failure in the King Street area lasted well into Thursday for some businesses because of trees downed on power lines between Barrett Street and Damon Road.
At the peak of the storm, one police cruiser sustained front-end damage when the officer driving was unable to avoid a tree limb that came down on Elm Street near Kensington Avenue. Another fallen tree damaged a car on Milton Street, according to police.
The hardest hit area in Northampton appeared to be the Elm Street corridor, though there were reports of downed tree limbs across the city, from the far-flung reaches of Leeds to the Meadows.
Tree limbs came down onto utility lines along Route 5 near Island Road and also shut down Route 5 in Holyoke Thursday.
Lights out in Westhampton, Easthampton
On Thursday, WMECO listed power interruptions or failures in 11 Hampshire County towns, including Westhampton, the hardest-hit town in Hampshire County, with about 97 percent of WMECO customers without power around 8 a.m. The utility said it has requested assistance from neighboring utilities to restore power and repair poles and power lines. The company says it could take a few days to restore power to the area.
Easthampton also had many power losses, with about half the customers still without electricity Thursday morning.
Trees were down on Maple, Park, Plain, Clark, South and Holyoke streets and Williston Avenue, but most of the debris had been cleared by 8 a.m., said Police Chief Bruce McMahon. There were no road closures and no major property damage, he said.
Street on fire in Hatfield
In Hatfield, Fire Chief William Belden and his firefighters crowded Old Stage Road, which had caught on fire.
Close to midnight on Wednesday, a fallen tree snapped power lines, which then dropped to the road and started an electrical fire. The fire melted the road's asphalt, leaving a 50-foot-long, smoldering gash in the road. Fumes, smelling like burning rubber, wafted through the northern Hatfield neighborhood.
George Wood, of 11 Old Stage Road, said he saw a big flare Wednesday night, when the electrical wire snapped. He surveyed the damage the following morning.
"The asphalt is now almost like glass, since the electrical wiring has been arcing for so long," Wood said.
His neighbor Chris Brennan, of 3 Old Stage Road, said he did not get much sleep the previous night, worried that his pile of cord wood would catch on fire and spread to his house. Unable to drive to Northampton High School, where he teaches English, Brennan said he was grading papers while he waited for Hatfield Fire Department to clear out his driveway.
The fire chief said the neighborhood's electrical wires will take time to repair, but all roads were to be cleared by the end of the day.
Clearing roads in Southampton
The Southampton Highway Department worked all through the night to clear roads of downed trees and branches, often accompanied by downed electrical wires.
Sections of Valley, Fomer, Montgomery, Pequot and Glendale roads were closed during the night because of the debris, which included transformers and split telephone poles. Glendale and Fomer roads were still closed as of 2 p.m. Thursday, but Superintendent Edward Cauley said he expected them to be cleared by 6 p.m.
Around midday, Cauley also said he had not yet been to bed since he was called out at 12:30 a.m. "We had our fair share of damage," he said.
Roads closed in Pelham
Enfield and Harkness roads in Pelham were both closed as a result of the storm. The latter was still closed around 1:30 p.m., said Richard Adamcek, Department of Public Works superintendent.
A number of utility polls, including one with a transformer, had fallen down across Harkness Road, Adamcek said. Pelham tree crews were still waiting for a team from WMECO to arrive at 1:30 p.m. to deal with the transformer, which was near the Amherst-Pelham line, Adamcek said.
He said crews had begun work just after midnight and were still working on Thursday afternoon.
Elsewhere in the Valley
Franklin County was also hit hard by the storm. Gov. Deval Patrick toured storm damage Thursday in Turners Falls, a village of Montague. Virtually the entire village was without power after it was particularly hard hit by the storms, a spokesman for the governor said.
Spared the wrath
Belchertown, Shutesbury, Cummington, Plainfield, Worthington, Williamsburg and South Hadley all reported minor damage from the storm, except for Brunelle's Marina where the owner estimated some $50,000 in losses, according to WWLP.com.
Nick Grabbe, Dan Crowley, Ben Storrow, Rebecca Everett, Laura Rodley, Daniel Scheer, Scott Merzbach, Owen Boss and The Associated Press contributed to this story.
