What Happens Next Time

There Is An Emergency?

To the Editor:

I purposely waited one week to write this letter to see if anyone else touched upon the subject. No one did. At 4:30 Sunday morning the 28th, five trees and one telephone pole fell across Hyvue Drive blocking it completely. There are 14 houses on this dead-end road and we are surrounded by forest. No vehicle could get in or out for four days. If there was an emergency, an ambulance would not have been able to get through. This is a very serious situation. Whoever is responsible for deciding where to cut up trees first should have a priority list. It is more important to unblock roads with no way out than it is to restore power. The town needs to sit down with whoever is responsible and set priorities. Every tree-cutting outfit in the area should be hired by the town to make roads passable. I’m sure there were other dead-ends affected.

On Wednesday, a neighbor had had enough and took his chainsaw and cut a “hole” through the trees big enough for a small vehicle to pass under the “hanging” wires. Then they had to go over a neighbor’s lawn and then back on the road to get out. At this time, I would like to publicly thank Frank and Miriam DeLucia (Frank is our ex-first selectman) for graciously allowing us to go over their lawn. On Thursday, the trees were finally cut up and piled along both sides of the road and a new telephone pole was put in place. Then they disappeared again. Finally, on Saturday, I was coming back from the supermarket and as I rounded the corner (Hyvue is a corkscrew and winds back and forth), I counted ten trucks. At least two were from Wisconsin and one from Tennessee. The rest I don’t know where they came from. My husband had brought down a milk jug full of iced tea so they would have something to drink. They put the power wires back up and left. The cable TV wires and the telephone wires were laying all over the road. This whole thing would be a real disaster in the cold weather if someone didn’t have a generator and/or ran out of gasoline to power it. We need to put a better battle plan together before the next hurricane (hopefully there won’t be one). Maybe if we all lived at the flagpole, we would have had a higher priority.

Louise Baker

17 Hyvue Drive, Newtown                                     September 13, 2011