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Photo Vincent Guadazno
A carport at 3 Holway Ave. in Provincetown was toppled by the storm. |
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Photo Emily Sussman
A tree split in half over the garage of Eastman Selectman Ken Collins, with one part skewering the roof. |
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Outer Cape blackout
By Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
A storm characterized by meteorologists as more of an explosion than a mere blizzard toppled trees and telephone poles and made ice-boxes of hundreds of homes here on the Outer Cape last weekend, and into the week, as whole towns found themselves without power. Not since Hurricane Bob, many residents said, has the Cape seen so much damage from a single storm.
At just before four o’clock on Friday afternoon, after a morning of gusty winds and rain and a brief sunny spell that lasted about 20 minutes, the weather seemed to go haywire. Winds gusted up to 75 to 100 miles an hour, driving rain turned to snow within a matter of seconds and locust trees along the sides of the roads began bending like fishing rods with something giant on the line. “Closed” signs popped up in the windows of businesses along Route 6 as the blackouts, which would leave tens of thousands of Cape Codders without heat or electricity over the weekend, began.
In Truro, the police department found itself without working telephone lines and radios when the generator had trouble kicking in. Luckily the outage lasted only a few minutes, Police Dispatcher Heidi Dyer said. Reports of downed trees and wires began trickling in from Pond Road, Priest Road, Fisher Road, Hatch Road, Mill Pond Road, Summit Avenue and Highland Avenue, where a 60-foot tree was snapped in half.
Though some residents were fortunate enough to have power restored by Saturday morning, others went without it until early this week. High Head in North Truro was among one of the last areas to get power, and the Citgo Station on Route 6 was still running on generators as of Sunday afternoon.
Downtown Wellfleet went without power until Sunday morning. On Friday and Saturday nights, the only glimmer along Main Street was from the twinkling Christmas lights on the trees in front of Town Hall. Even so, businesses like the Wellfleet Marketplace remained open, providing batteries and flashlights and other supplies to people who needed them and using pencil and paper to conduct transactions rather than cash registers. Manager Paul Souza said he was “thrilled” the store could be of service during such a time and reported that they were in the process of buying a generator in case of future outages.
There were reports of 100-mile-an-hour wind gusts in Wellfleet and Eastham, which could not be confirmed by the weather service. The U.S. Coast Guard station in Provincetown clocked winds at 45 miles an hour, according to Coast Guard Petty Officer Barnett.
“It was literally an explosive development,” said Neal Strauss, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s southeastern Massachusetts office. Strauss said the violent weather was the spawn of a collision between an “Alberta Clipper,” an influx of Arctic air from the northwest, and a secondary system of low pressure that was developing rapidly along the mid-Atlantic coast. The track of that second system put it just south of Cape Cod on Friday afternoon.
“It intensified so fast that the winds on the back side of the [system] were very strong,” Strauss said. He acknowledged that “the effects of it seemed a lot like a hurricane.” A high wind watch had been issued earlier on Friday, but the actual storm “was slightly more intense than was forecast,” Strauss said. “Because the cold air came in so fast there was a lot of momentum to it.”
He offered as an explanation for the complete uprooting of trees that occurred in many places the fact that the ground was saturated from the earlier rainfall. The combination of soggy ground and the sudden, intense gusts of wind resulted in more tree damage than was anticipated.
Michael Durand, a spokesperson for NStar, said that of the 150,000 people who lost power in southeastern Massachusetts on Friday night, the majority were on the Cape. The hardest hit areas were in Chatham, Orleans, Brewster and other parts of the Lower Cape, he said. By Saturday, power had been restored to about 75,000, and by Monday there were only isolated pockets, mostly individual residences, that still needed hooking up.
“I have seen and heard that in some parts of the Lower Cape it was like a tornado going through,” Durand said. “The damage was very, very exceptional because of downed trees and wires.”
He acknowledged that NStar made the decision to shut off the power to entire towns — though he could not specify which ones — because of the number of damaged wires. NStar worked closely with local emergency officials and only shut down large areas when it was thought that the damaged wires could present a public safety risk, he said.
klum@provincetownbanner.com
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Dec 15th, 2005