State, Local Crews, Volunteers Continue Newtown Storm Cleanup

By Kendra Bobowick,

Shannon Hicks, & John Voket

To state road residents watching and waiting for someone to come clear their piled storm debris, state Department of Transportation Spokesman Kevin Nursick said: “We’ll get there. Bear with us.”

By Sunday, December 4, his words proved true as crews worked along Route 34, lifting and carting away storm debris piled curbside.

Just one day earlier he had said that cleanups in the Newtown area should be “ramping up. Folks may already have debris out, but if they don’t have it out they should get it out soon.” An early November release to “property owners abutting state-maintained roads” announced that statewide debris pickups would continue through December 15, but Mr Nursick is now looking ahead to Christmas for a finish date.

“We wanted to be able to provide a schedule, but we learned quickly and early that we couldn’t predict reliably,” he said. Crews “don’t know what they’re getting into” until they start picking up the piles. A schedule is “virtually impossible to estimate,” he said. State cleanups began November 5 following the October 29 nor’easter, dubbed Winter Storm Alfred.

At the same time, town crews have been working to clear roadsides of piled branches and downed limbs since the late October storm.

Public Works Director Fred Hurley explained that crews “should be done” clearing debris soon. After breaking the town into four quadrants, he said Friday, December 1, “We are well into quadrant three [the northeast section of town}.” He anticipated that quadrant four, the southeast section of town, would begin soon. He said, “We have a shot at finishing by next week.”

Separate from the cleanup is an effort to remove hanging limbs or leaning trees. With the help of a Connecticut Light & Power bucket crew dedicated to assisting Newtown, he said that efforts to cut and clear “hangers,” will be ongoing. “This could go well into the winter,” he said. “It will be a work in progress.”

December 1

Miriam Garcia of Hartford was working as one of two flaggers controlling the flow of traffic December 1 around men who had been contracted by the state, she said, to clear brush following the nor’easter. She and her boyfriend worked with a crew from Christopher LLC, out of Kearney, Mo. She woke up at 4 am Sunday, to be at a meeting an hour later, and she and the crew arrived in Newtown by 7 am, she said.

Two right-of-way tree-clearing trucks spent Sunday working their way south along Route 34. Each truck looked like a pair of huge black boxes on wheels, with claw arms operated by the truck’s drivers. The claws came from within the trailers, grabbed a pile of debris, and loaded the trailers until they were overflowing with brush. As each truck filled, it left Newtown for a drop-off location in Danbury.

Andrew Sands, who had been hired as a monitor for the crew, said the dumping location is near the Danbury bus station.

Each crew, Mr Sands said, is sent out with at least one monitor, whose job is to watch what is picked up by the trucks, and report back to the state when he or she sees additional brush or branches that should be picked up. Mr Sands was seeing a lot of hangers — single branches or clumps of branches that are hanging perilously from upper trees — along Berkshire Road, and used his cellphone to photograph as many as he could.

“The cellphone photos have GPS attached to them, so I can show exactly where each of these trouble spots are still located,” he explained. “There is a lot that is being left behind. These crews can’t get to the hangers, but they need to be addressed. The next storm we get, these hangers are going to come down on the wires, or worse, they’re going to hit the roads and maybe a passing car.”

It was a slow, laborious process on Sunday. The crew was working near Curtis Packaging, just west of the intersection of Berkshire Road and Toddy Hill Road, around 1 pm. By 3:15 the trucks had reached just past Zoar Road, about 1.3 miles, and they were picking up brush from just the west side of the roadway.

“We have to work with the traffic flow,” said Mr Sands. “It’s hard enough to make sure we get all the brush, but we can’t completely stop traffic.”

Aftermath

A local grassroots initiative to aid Newtowners who need assistance is still looking for anyone who needs help, as well as individuals willing to pitch in and assist with whatever may be left from this latest storm. Organizers Kevin Fitzgerald and John Breny met with Health District Director Donna Culbert and Emergency Communications Director Maureen Will December 2 to learn how to safely coordinate efforts.

Mr Fitzgerald said he currently has about 45 volunteers who have participated in cleanup efforts since a rogue snowstorm hit the region in late October causing extensive power outages in town that affected some residents for more than a week and toppled thousands of trees.

Ms Culbert said while neither she nor the town could officially support the volunteer crew in its current configuration, she and Ms Will were in the early stages of forming a Community Emergency Response Team or CERT, which would be specially trained and authorized to assist in both shelter management and the type of outreach Mr Fitzgerald and his friends were doing informally.

The health district director said the CERT team would be officially recognized, could be empowered to assist local police with health and welfare checks, and would have liability coverage as an extended municipal response corps. Shelter training would be provided additionally by the Red Cross, whose volunteers staffed the Newtown shelter following the recent storm.

Ms Culbert added that some volunteers might also be certified for large-scale food service, so they could aid in food preparation and serving at a municipal shelter. And Ms Will mentioned that the town’s emergency operations center (EOC) was equipped with ham radios, so local ham operators could become an important part of the emergency communications network.

Ultimately, Ms Will said that any community groups who could provide a number of volunteers for current cleanup work should contact Mr Fitzgerald via e-mail at kevinkis@aol.com. There are still a number of residents asking for assistance.

Mr Nursick estimates “upwards of four million cubic yards of debris statewide” that the state or debris management contractors will have to pick up, he said. Debris is being transferred to roughly a dozen satellite stations throughout the state where it is chipped. “But where will it go from there?” he wondered. Under normal conditions, accumulated mulch can be stored, then sold as needed. “But this storm is not normal. Normal is out the window,” he said.

The mulch market is “saturated,” he explained. What will the state do? “That is to be determined,” he said.

The State’s Debris Management Program was developed to expedite debris cleanup related to storms like Alfred. Only tree-related debris will be picked up at property along state-maintained roads.

For further information, contact the DOT Office of Communications at 860-594-3062 or visit www.ct.gov/dot.