Heavy rain, winds wallop Chester

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2022 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Yesterday afternoon Chester got the worst of a storm which swept across Vermont taking down many trees, knocking out power to more than 56 percent of Green Mountain Power’s Chester customers and sending more than two dozen firefighters from Chester and Proctorsville out on “a month’s worth of calls.”

Just before 4 p.m. the Chester Fire Department was alerted to storm damage, including trees and power lines down, according to the department chief Matt Wilson. Click any image to launch a gallery of photos

“And then we got four calls in a matter of a few seconds,” said Wilson, who set up in the fire station to coordinate the department’s efforts as the town of Hartford was also hit hard.

That was significant because Hartford is the dispatch center for that town’s emergency services as well as Chester’s.

“We tried to do command and dispatch at the same time out of here to free them up,” said Wilson.

With a monitor that shows where incidents have been reported and a white board for keeping track of fire trucks and personnel, Wilson began overseeing the response to what would end up being 16 calls.

The major damage was to the west of the fire station with trees and wires down in roads. There was a pole snapped off and wires down on Lovers Lane, many trees ripped out of the ground along Blue Hill Road and trees and wires down in front of the Stone Hearth Inn backed traffic up to Lovers Lane before firefighters began turning them around and sending them on detours.

In the middle of the storm response, the fire department got a call that a dump truck was in the river on Route 103. That meant they had to drop everything and respond to that call but according to Wilson, firefighters and police checked the area and even other rivers and never found a dump truck.

“I don’t have anything definitive from the National Weather Service about what it was, I’m assuming at bare minimum it was a microburst,” said Wilson, “I was working out of here today and when it hit it sounded like a tornado…we got hit hard quickly.”

In addition to firefighters, Road Foreman Kirby Putnam and members of his crew worked to move trees and debris where downed wires were not involved.

At the Stone Hearth, owner Vicky Mustoe said they had been washing windows and putting the finishing touches on the inn portion of the property ahead of a pre-opening inspection. She was uncertain if there damage to the electrical system from a lightning strike, but the property lost several trees and the lighting for its parking lot.

Blue Hill Road resident Rosann Sexton wrote in an email on Wednesday morning, “I have at least 15 plus trees down or severely damaged around the house. Green Mt. Power men were here at 6 a.m. to take down the live wire that was down to the barn. Thank goodness it only affected the barn. They said they thought our road had the most damage of anywhere around. Mother nature did a number on us.”

On Lovers Lane, all that could be done was to put up a “road closed” sign since GMP said they did not know when they would get to it.

“It sounds like quite a few houses and cars – more cars – had trees all over them,” said Wilson at around 7 p.m., “We’ve taken care of the life safety calls and now it’s up to GMP.”

“One nice thing about being here in this new building – we’ve never had a generator before this,” said Wilson “So we were fully able to operate the entire time even though we lost power…it was amazing, our computers didn’t shut down, our radios didn’t shut down.”

Southern New Hampshire also got hit, with the fast moving storm, knocking out power to 4308 including New Hampshire Public Radio.

Once the storm hit the Granite State, New Hampshire Public Radio was knocked off the air, a situation that its engineers were continuing to work on after 7 p.m.

Cynthia Prairie contributed to this article.