Connecticut ping!
Pretty wild day here in Connecticut... hope you are all back online!
Please Freepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent Connecticut ping list.
Posted on 01/18/2006 3:06:13 PM PST by nutmeg
(Hartford-WTNH, Jan. 18, 2006 Updated 5:00 PM ) _High winds and heavy rain are to blame for a real mess across the state.
Downed trees and power lines have left thousands without power.
Right now, 97,500 Connecticut Light and Power customers are in the dark as well as more than 4,100 United Illuminating customers.
Many of these customers are in Fairfield County.
"Just as long as the big one don't come down," says John Marinelli.
It is just branches and brush for John Marinelli, but his neighbor in Wethersfield is not so lucky. One of his neighbor's trees fell.
"It scared me, it really scared me," says Marinelli.
"And the wind had to be very strong to do what it did," says Terry D'Italia, Hartford Public Schools.
Some scary moments at FAND Elementary school in Hartford.
"The metal roof on the gymnasium behind us here, one section of it just peeled right up and blew off and it is now on top of the playscape," says D'Italia.
Pieces of metal are now flapping in the wind. No one was hurt, but students were bussed to another school as a precaution.
Parents picked up children in the soaking rain.
"I thought is was okay this morning but now I am finding out all this wind and all this extra... I don't know. It is crazy," says Aquwin Brown, Hartford.
The wind left behind damage across the state.
"It's awful. The road is terrible. People were driving without their headlights on," says Sally Marinelli, Wethersfield.
Toppled trees in West Hartford, the wind pulled a pine up in Wethersfield kept the utility and emergency crews busy.
"They are pretty tapped out. They are running pretty much. I think they finally got lunch," says one firefighter.
But there is plenty of work still to be done.
The high winds also caused problems in New Haven.
A tree was blown over on Edgehill and Huntington Streets, ripping down some telephone lines in the process.
Police had to block off a number of streets while they cleared the scene.
There were no injuries.
And there is trouble on the tracks for Metro North.
A tree fell on the tracks in the Bronx during the morning rush commute, disrupting service for hours.
Things are slowly starting to move again, but riders on the New Haven and Harlem lines can expect delays of up to 90 minutes.
The New Canaan line is still down because of a tree that fell on overhead lines.
The commute will also be slow tomorrow morning, with some reductions in local service.
For more information:
Metro North: http://www.mta.info/mnr/
CLP: http://www.cl-p.com/stormcenter/outage.aspx
UI: http://www.uinet.com/customer_service/outageList.asp
Connecticut ping!
Pretty wild day here in Connecticut... hope you are all back online!
Please Freepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent Connecticut ping list.
"Hours" to remove a stupid tree? How inept are these workers?
Could they have found any more inane quotes than the ones that they sprinkled so liberally through this article?
First, almost all the lines here are above ground -- almost nothing is buried. I'm not sure if this is due to cost, terrain, or what. But it's quite odd that the lines aren't buried.
Another thing that is really prevalent in this part of the country is NIMBYism and BANANAism (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). CL&P is only now building two 345 kilovolt lines, and this was after years of lawsuits by various neighborhood groups and towns and such. As a result, the Connecticut electrical grid is a complete mess. Various power experts have said that it's akin to something in a third world country.
It's not just power. It's everything that someone wants to build here. You'll have all these coalitions lined up against anything that is proposed to be built. Frankly, I'm amazed that anything gets built. Condo complexes, grocery stores, hotels, widened roads, electric lines, hockey rinks, cell phone towers, you name it, there's some vocal group against it. A church wanted to expand, and the local neighbors claimed it would lead to too much traffic or something. In South Salem, NY, just over the CT border, a group of residents even got a cell phone tower stopped even though the tower would be concealed entirely within an existing church steeple. People just don't want stuff built.
There is currently a power line betwen CT and Long Island NY, and there's a fight if the owners should be allowed to turn it on. And some company wants to build a LNG terminal 11 miles offshore, and people are against it. Terrorism (it's 11 miles from anything), the view (once again, something 11 miles away doesn't really affect your view), and the environment (LNG is supposed to be good, right?) are all reasons to oppose it.
That's the real story.
There are a lot of trees down here in the CT shoreline towns. My next door neighbor lost a 40 ft. pine tree that fell right onto the brand new addition to his house. Branches were sticking out of the roof like porcupine quills. The root ball came up out of the ground under my fence and a couple of panels were busted up. Downed trees lined the Merrit Parkway on the way to Stamford, lots of power outages. For the most part, just an inconvenience as nature does a little pruning. Its been a while since we had strong winds blowing out of the north, and the ground is not frozen. I also thought that the warm weather might have caused an early sap rise so the trees might have been a bit top heavy.
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