HILLTOWNS – Huntington and Chester were two of the hilltowns that saw a great deal of damage with trees and wires down from Tropical Storm Isaias, which hit on Aug. 4. After mostly dodging the tornado threat on Aug. 2, the Hilltowns were not spared from Isaias’ southerly winds.

Huntington Highway Superintendent Charles “Chip” Dazelle said if he had to roughly guess, he would say about 100 to 120 households had no power after the storm hit.  “We’re finally getting the electricity back on,” Dazelle said on Aug. 7, three days after the storm.

One family on Harlow Clark Road was trapped in their home when the trees and all the wires from six poles came down during the height of the storm on Aug. 4.  They did not get the road back open until midnight on Aug. 5, according to Dazelle, and Verizon still had wires blocking the road.

“If there had been an emergency, I would have had to use a UTV to get to them,” he said.

Dazelle said when the storm started in Huntington about 4 p.m.,  Lambson Road, which extends from Harlow Clark to Montgomery Road was closed immediately. Goss Hill Road,  another hard hit section of town, also closed immediately.  

Goss Hill had three snapped poles and four or five huge trees in the road on the section between Littleville Road and Littleville Dam, and between Littleville Dam and Nagler Cross Road, primaries were ripped off of 12 poles, which caused everybody else on the hill to have no power until late in the  afternoon of Aug. 6.  “A lot of generators were running,” Dazelle said.

“We had other stragglers here and there. We were able to open them with the bucket loader, pushing away trees that weren’t on power lines. We also used snow plows on trucks to push branches out of the way; they’re a great asset to us in removing branches,” Dazelle said.

When the storm ended around 8 p.m. or so on Aug. 4, Dazelle, Police Chief Robert Garriepy, and Emergency Management Director Dennis Nazzaro assessed the damage and relayed the information to Eversource.

However, Dazelle said he didn’t hear from Eversource until Aug. 5. “This is the worst communication we’ve ever experienced with them,” he said, adding that he wondered how much the COVID-19 restrictions played a part in their response.

For one, Eversource can’t have two guys in a truck because of the pandemic, Dazelle said, whereas before they would send two or three.  He also wondered whether the utility was not able to get equipment out, and if that delayed their response.   

“So I don’t know how much COVID came into play. It was our biggest question from the beginning of the storm; in an emergency do the COVID rules still apply,” Dazelle said, adding that this is a question the town will look into as it heads into the winter months.  “We had more communication in the blizzard of 2011.”

Besides the delayed response, Dazelle said on the town’s part, they did well. “We tried our best. We’re always here to help the citizens,” he said.  

One advantage is that the Highway Department still has both Comcast numbers  and Verizon landlines. “If people can’t get through [on Comcast], we still have 667 numbers.  Anybody that still has landlines was able to still contact us. Bobby [Garriepy] pointed out that this was the reason to keep it, and it’s proven to work out really well.  Verizon still works. if you have power or not, you’ll have a phone,” he said.

“We did good. Our hardest frustration was relaying to residents that Eversource was telling us nothing,” Dazelle said.  

“It was a disaster,” agreed Chester Highway Superintendent Corey Sparks. He added that on Aug. 4, when Isaias started, “We didn’t even leave work at quitting time, when the call came in about the first tree down. It just got worse after that.”

Sparks said he was making a list of the storm damage as they received it. “We had over 40 big trees down on almost 20 different roads. They were hung up on wires, and we had wires ripped down,” he said.

Unlike Huntington, Chester owns its own electric company. Sparks said the Chester Municipal Electric Light Department (CMELD) was “on it right from the get go. They were prepared, and they know what they’re doing.”  

Right after the storm ended, CMELD was able to start taking the trees off the wires, and the Highway Department was able to clear those trees.  Of the 40 trees on wires, close to half of them were on wires covered by CMELD.

Sparks said when the Highway Department went home Aug. 4 around midnight, there were still some trees on wires, but ones they couldn’t do anything about until Eversource contractors got there.   He said they were back on the job at 6 a.m. on Aug. 5, cutting trees all day long. Eversource arrived in Chester on Aug. 5.

Sparks said one problem the Chester response teams did have from the storm were the dirt roads that were washed out in the heavy rain that fell. Grading the dirt roads had been the department’s project for the last couple of weeks, but the ground was too dry to soak up the rain, and it chewed them up and made ditches.

“It was a setback for sure on the dirt roads. One step forward and two steps back,” he said.

Sparks also observed that the town has sustained much higher wind speeds in previous storms than those from Isaias, but the high degree of damage was from southerly winds, whereas normally storms bring northerly winds. “The trees don’t grow like that. The southerly winds snapped them,” he said.

“I don’t know what the strongest wind was during that storm, but I don’t think it was over 60 miles per hour. We’ve had much more severe storms than that, and not had that damage. Ice storms in the winter with thousands of pounds frozen to the trees, and some snapped, but not as devastating as this,” Sparks said, adding, “It was a heck of a storm.”

Sparks, who lives in Becket, took over as highway supervisor in December. Before that, he worked as a driver/laborer in town for a year and a half. “I’m glad I did. I’m not from Chester, and before I worked here, I didn’t even know where Main Street was. Now I’ve met so many people, there’s a lot of great people around here. I like it, it’s a great little community,” he said.