Tuesday, November 15, 2011

SOUTH HADLEY - Face it, we live like The Jetsons. Press a button and voila - instant banking, instant contact with the world at large, instant hot water at the turn of a faucet.

And then a premature force of nature name of Winter Storm Alfred descended upon treetops and bowled through tall timber like "War of the Worlds," pulling every plug in its path.

As darkness fell Saturday night, Oct. 29, and the snow poured down and stuck, the first limbs began dropping from the fearsomely changing sky.

Candles. Flashlights. Batteries? Food! Teeth chattering like joke shop choppers. No heat, no electricity, no Pats game, no Dexter on Showtime Sunday night.

The Jetsons had been canceled.

Winter Storm Alfred. Saturday, Day 1. 11:17 p.m.

We thought the guy up in the bucket was dead. The line truck from the South Hadley Electric Light Department (SHELD) had arrived moments earlier, in the midst of a heavy, hard, fast snow that had been coming down all day. The trees had begun to give way hours earlier, their still-foliated limbs splitting in muffled gunshot blasts - in the distance, in the yard next door, BOOM! on the lawn right out front.

Two guys in hard hats got out of the cab. One climbed up on top of the truck, hopped into the bucket and boomed himself hydraulically to the treetops, while the other stayed on the ground and kept watch with a flashlight.

The guy up high with the climbing saw, cutting through cracked limbs that dangerously clung to wires, was, we were later to learn, lineman Pete Jesionowski, 43, of South Hadley. The guy below was Larry Fisher, of Easthampton. The duo had been trimming trees for about six hours at that point. The snow beat into Jesionowski's face, his body silhouetted against an eerie wash of lightning - the entire sky aflame in indigo blue, a minute later in bright orange, as if there were something else at work here, something far away and a bit more mysterious than premature weather patterns.

One more good cut and he would free the primary wire and move on to the next hazard down the street by our house when WHAM! - a 15-foot limb, 10 inches round, clobbered the lineman, and into the bucket he disappeared. He did not come back up. Seconds ticked by.

"You OK?" yelled Fisher from the ground, quickly making his way to the truck. "You OK?"

"Yeah," said Jesionowski, finally, appearing wobbly as he straightened up in the bucket. "But I think I have to come down."

The journalist in me kicked in. When the river rushes through your living room or trees fall onto your house, someone like me will likely pay you a visit. Hilltown folks who survived that ice storm two winters back will tell you about lying fretfully awake all night and listening to trees all around them creak, crack and thunder to the ground. We will put miles on the car to hear you tell that story.

But no miles were needed last week. Things that happened to everyone else also happened to our little Leave it to Beaver neighborhood. South Hadley is not a Hilltown full of forest. The trees that did all that crashing were mainly of the backyard, front yard, sidewalk variety, as much a part of one's everyday world as a dog.

Here are some facts you should know about the inhabitants of 9 Oak Ave.: There are six gigantic trees on our property, which, every fall, fill 100 36-inch bags with leaves. (Yes, I have counted.) The towering woolly mammoth mother of this bunch - a swamp maple, this constantly shedding nine-headed hydra whose leaders stretch over houses and garages like swords of Damocles - rises from the very center of the lawn.

When the last of Alfred's flakes finally fall, this house will be the one most photographed by walkers out to survey the damage.

But we were talking about Saturday night. As I tried to get out to talk to the injured lineman, huge limbs were falling from the woolly mammoth and others. Time and again I was driven back.

"Get in here!" yelled family members.

"This guy was hurt," I said, eyeing the creaking timber above, "I've got to talk to him."

"Don't be an ass!" said my brother, as a limb the size of a speedboat crashed onto the driveway a foot from where my next step would have been, effectively settling the issue. The frontline guys who climb up poles during snowstorms are a different breed, a fraternity of courage. I am not among them. I watched the rest of Night 1 from my porch.

Jesionowski, speaking from his home a few days later, spoke of the incident that almost did him in.

"I had to get the large broken leader off the primary wire," Jesionowski said. "I got everything, but the wire was under so much pressure. It hit the forehead part of my helmet, then it went up in the air, flipped, and landed on top of me."

"I was out cold ... unconscious for about 30 seconds," he said. "The first thing I did when I came to is feel my face. I had all my teeth. I tried to shrug it off and keep working but I couldn't clear my head. I got out of my harness and sat in the cab. (Larry) got suited up and went up."

An ambulance, hindered by downed trees in every roadway, took 20 minutes to get there.

"Hey, there's an ambulance," said Jesionowski to himself. "Somebody must have gotten hurt. I didn't know they were coming for me."

He was taken to Baystate, diagnosed with a concussion and ordered off the road.

CRAAAAACK! - another long and gnarly leader breaks and falls, kicking up snow on the lawn like 9/11 dust. I went to bed about midnight, gritting my teeth with every crack of wood, expecting any second for one or more of my trees to come crashing through my ceiling like the landing gear of a Westover C-5.

Sunday, Day 2, 7:25 a.m.

If you were a kid, or at least a kid who grew up playing in the woods, the front lawn would look like the fortress of the century. Giant limbs of many trees hang suspended by threads like cascades of toilet paper on Cabbage Night; the entire yard, front and back, just riddled with the wreckage of hacked-off limbs and branches.

It's hard to describe something like this, something not seen before. Like electricity, hot water and heat, trees are taken for granted, too. To see them now, split wide open in silent shriek, exposed and ravaged, but still reaching, fighting back against mortality, in front of every house, on every street, in every single neighborhood is almost obscene.

Around the corner, on Carol Ann Drive, a large tree fell on wires and the force of it took down a utility pole, and with it came a transformer, all of which now lies in the middle of the street, wires strewn across lawns like fire hoses. Hazmat will come and power-wash the mineral-based oil off the street, but it could be a week before power's restored. One neighbor has a wire draped over his pickup truck; another's pickup was flattened by a tree.

"My brother's truck got hit," said Chris Tucker, 29, pointing to the big limb smothering the pickup's bed.

Neighbors were cheerful, maybe out of relief for coming out of it alive, and met in the street and strategized. Norm Blanchard and his bride of 53 years, Jean, have lived on this street since 1965. The maple they planted out back is split in two. He will play a key role in the cleanup, his spirit keeping the rest of us focused.

"I prayed, 'Don't hurt anyone's house,'" said Jean.

Rich Boileau, 60, walks up and down the street with his chain saw, reducing downed leaders to logs. "That's what neighbors are for," he says. Boileau was once the Blanchards' paperboy, delivering the Holyoke Transcript. He has come back to live in the house he grew up in, back when the neighborhood was mostly woods.

We all duck as the wind gusts, well aware that limbs hanging precariously above could go at any minute. Everyone expects the power to be out at least three days, maybe five.

Monday, Day 3: Boileau and other chain saw-wielders have managed to cut up the tree blocking Carol Ann Drive, which means neighbors like Jeannine O'Brien can get out.

"We have a hole in our siding from a fallen tree, but it could have been so much worse," she said. "We've got a big tree hanging over the house."

That it all happened in places like South Hadley or Chicopee or Agawam seems surreal, she said. "I've got friends in Colrain. They lose power anytime it snows. Now they've got power and I'm out - you should hear them laugh.

"Am I surprised? Not with everything we've had this year," said O'Brien.

And the days mount up. Shivering, it turns out, is not good for spinal alignment.

The president declares western Mass. a disaster area.

A governor has visited - did you see the look on his face? Clearly moved. Demands an investigation. A senator, one with the worst environmental record on record, demands a daily report from the utilities, accounting for their every minute on the job. The readiness of departments is called into question.

Ready? Ready for what? A winter storm long before winter, when trees are still heavy with leaves? Geez, that happens all the time, right? Page 43 in the handbook. And when Godzilla comes dripping and seething out of South Hadley Falls? Page 86.

But when the house doesn't work for days upon time, somebody sure needs to get an earful.

Thursday, Day 6: Most of the neighborhood's power has been restored. A SHELD crew led by lineman Dennis Canavan and electrician Bob Lasker of South Hadley and Pete Jesionowski's partner Larry Fisher are over on Harvard Street about to hook everyone back up.

"I've had 20 hours of sleep since Saturday," Lasker said. "You don't know the devastation we've had and the resources we had to work with."

"I can't thank these guys enough," said resident Evan Briant, 23, who works as a call fireman and had spent most of the week cutting roads open so restoration crews could do their thing. "For being shorthanded, they've done great.

"My parents have been piling up the blankets," Briant said, "but I can live days without power."

Like most of the people who work in natural disasters, Briant likes the work.

"I love the job," he said. "I love helping people."

Home recovering from his concussion, Pete Jesionowski expressed frustration at the barrage of criticism coming from the suits.

"It disgusts me," he said. "On a normal day when you get a pole hit, it takes four or five hours to get it back up. It's easy to complain from your living room. Spend a day with me. Come out there for 17, 18 hours straight with me."

"I got more rest than the other guys," he said. "I was out two and a half days. And we still managed to get all the power in South Hadley restored by Saturday afternoon. This was an all-out effort, with everybody coming together to make it happen.

"It's the worst storm I've ever seen," said Jesionowski. "In other disasters, like that hurricane this summer, you have isolated pockets of damage, but this is widespread."

Like the crews from North Carolina and Vermont who assisted in this storm, Jesionowski has also travels great distances when disaster strikes.

"I worked that ice storm in Chester, Blandford and Middlefield," he said. "In 2004 a bunch of us drove a digger truck and a bucket truck to Florida." The state, not the town.

"You run out the door and might not be home for days," he said. "We could have damage in our own homes, no lights, no heat, but it takes a backseat. When I hear the politicians complain I don't get the sense we're all working for the common good."

By Thursday, Jesionowski was cleared for light duty. "I can't drive or go up in the bucket, but there's plenty to do being a ground guy. I got house services back up, wrote up jobs, limited stuff.

"I still feel lousy - headaches, nausea, dizziness," he said. "But I feel so guilty I was out of work while these guys worked so hard."

But for all the complaining, some people just adjusted and made discoveries in the process. Bill and Pat Baxter of Lyman Terrace, married 47 years, seemed to find each other. With Fox News and MSNBC and Don Imus on hiatus from a darkened picture tube, the couple just sat in their living room and talked.

About what? "Oh, nothin' much," said Bill. "Just little things, but we hadn't done that in years."

Bob Flaherty, the morning host at WHMP-AM in Northampton, writes a weekly column for the Gazette.