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Photos Sally Rose
Vaughn Cabral pitches in to help some neighbors clear a snow-covered sloped driveway. |
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A lone smoker stands behind a wall of snow Monday evening in front of the Alibi. |
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Blizzard buries town
Some streets still unplowed on Tuesday
Mary Ann Bragg
Banner Staff
The depths of snow, and the winds, were unfathomable.
In Provincetown three snowplows blew their transmissions. The primary route into town was closed, and only fully reopened Tuesday night. An ambulance was stuck for two hours on a road, nursing a patient with a dislocated shoulder: an accident caused by snow shoveling. A cancer patient was plucked from his home, when the electricity failed and temperatures inside the house sunk to 39 degrees. And the town’s emergency shelter had problems of its own, being located at the top of a steep incline that required constant plowing. “It was basically like a hurricane with snow,” town Red Cross volunteer Pauline Richmond said on Monday. “It’s the wildest storm I’ve ever seen, bigger than 1978, and the winds… It was just ridiculous.”
As it turns out no one stayed at the shelter, Richmond said, despite snowfall in the range of 32 inches, winds upwards of 67 mph, an unusually high tide, temperatures in the teens and flickering lights that ultimately left some without electricity from morning to night. (The shelter is located at the elementary school on Winslow Street.)
The snowfall began in earnest late Saturday night and ended around 9 p.m. on Sunday. By 5 p.m. Sunday, Town Manager Keith Bergman had declared a state of emergency, allowing the town to seek help from the National Guard. In total eight Guardsmen were in town this week in four Humvees that rumbled along town streets, able to climb High Pole Hill Road to the Pilgrim Monument with hardly a spin. The Guard helped primarily with transporting town staff, such as police officers and nursing home employees, and directing traffic, Police Chief Ted Meyer said.
Residents did call the police station and the shelter to check out their options, Richmond said, but nearly all decided to stick it out at home, given the steady snow, the wind and the depths of the drifts. “We had four cases but they were diverted to the Manor [nursing home],” she said. Those four cases included the cancer patient and a person with a hip replacement who had to be moved with a specially designed chair.
On Monday Manor CEO Dennis Anderson said one of the four “guests” remained. And, he added, the Manor had challenges too. “When a staff member phones and says they will get to the Manor as soon as they can get through a window, because their doors were not useable, then it makes such a statement of commitment and how people respond when they know they are needed,” Anderson said. (The Manor has about 30 residents and about 45 employees.) “I had one nurse whose husband took the position that he was a New Englander and he got her to us from Wellfleet when the weather was just in its first rapid decline, only to have a head-on collision on Route 6A. All were okay but that nurse still came in, worked endlessly, and we put her husband up at the Cape Inn, which was responsive and helpful.”
Chief Meyer said his dispatchers handled hundreds of calls, with many people asking about their electricity service. Sections of the West End were without power for about 14 hours, as were many buildings around Town Hall. (This week NSTAR did not have an exact count of outages for each town on Cape Cod, but at the highest point 25,000 customers lost power. As of 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, power had been restored to all Cape towns, an NSTAR spokesperson said.)
Early Sunday morning in Provincetown, in the darkness, callers complained to police about a blue arcing light, like lightening, that intermittently brightened the sky. NSTAR, which had two linemen and a truck at the fire station, diagnosed the problem as electrical lines banging together in the wind. “But there was nothing to do,” Fire Chief Mike Trovato said on Tuesday. “They were trying, but [you couldn’t] put somebody up in the bucket truck with 60 mph winds.” And NSTAR’s presence in town, while comforting, was hampered when the truck boom broke while at the fire station and then the crew had to take a legally mandated sleep break.
Less than a handful of calls were received about potential carbon monoxide poisoning and snow-covered furnace vents, Fire Chief Trovato said. In each case, an ambulance was dispatched along with a town snowplow. Ultimately none of the calls required medical transport. (As for the ambulance that was stuck in the snow for two hours, the vehicle was ultimately freed and the patient was taken to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.)
Most of the other calls into the police station were about snow plowing, Police Chief Meyer said, with many side roads remaining unplowed as of Tuesday evening. The town of Provincetown has about 130 streets, and three main thoroughfares — Commercial and Bradford streets, and Shank Painter Road — were the priority, town officials said. (The state highway department is responsible for clearing Route 6, which was fully shut down by Sunday and then only fully opened again Tuesday evening.)
Town highway department foreman Ray Duarte ran the plowing operation from the highway garage on Race Point Road, and it was to Duarte that every person involved in the emergency efforts turned. His road crew consisted of eight to nine town employees and six plows, three of which ended up with blown transmissions by Tuesday. Plus the town contracted with all willing local snow plowers. “The roads are barely passable and barely acceptable, and we’re down to the new truck that we purchased last week, plus two other smaller trucks,” Director of Public Works David Guertin said Tuesday evening. “Although now the issue is manpower, not equipment. There are safety concerns about the crews working extended hours, and Ray is cycling the troops right now, sending them home. Unfortunately, pedestrians and people just getting out of their houses, and driving around, are now impeding further snow removal. We’re still in the process of taking care of primary roads. Secondary roads will have to wait unless there is an emergency.” (The town’s budget for snow and ice is around $450,000.)
At the harbor on Saturday, commercial fishermen had anticipated the high winds and moved their boats to the west side of the town pier, double- and triple-tying their shore lines. Still, the scene on Sunday was this, according to one observer: the boats were pushed hard to the west in the wind, the lines on some boats tightened and frayed in the wind and then snapped loose; pickup trucks backed up to the pier’s edge and tried to tug the loosened boats close to the pier, and fishermen clambered over heaps of snow and ice, attempting to jump onto the boats, to retie the lines. The stern line of the “Pamet” broke loose first, cracking like a rifle shot, according to one report. All hands, including town staff from the Public Pier Corp. and the harbormaster’s office, were used to help boat owners, many of whom live out-of-town and called in, unable to leave their houses in the storm, or cross over the Provincetown town line.
As of Tuesday night, Town Manager Bergman had not lifted the state of emergency, and he said he expected to be able to receive state funds to aid in the town’s recovery from the storm. The blizzard kept Town Hall shut down until noon on Tuesday. Town boards were scrambling to reschedule meetings, and schools remained closed on Wednesday.
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St. Peter’s church destroyed by fire
In the News
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Jan 27th, 2005