Mayor, chief assess damages in wake of storm

Kelcy Dolan
Posted 8/6/15

“For having no warning for this storm, I think we are fairing well,” Mayor Scott Avedisian said Tuesday afternoon as he and Fire Chief Edmund Armstrong took a drive throughout the …

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Mayor, chief assess damages in wake of storm

Posted

“For having no warning for this storm, I think we are fairing well,” Mayor Scott Avedisian said Tuesday afternoon as he and Fire Chief Edmund Armstrong took a drive throughout the city.

Together the two assessed conditions, making calls to the appropriate parties every time they saw another downed tree or electrical line.

The macroburst, with torrential rains and 80-mile-per-hour winds, early Tuesday morning left nearly 75 percent of the city without power, according to a National Grid Media Relations, David Graves, 30,000 of Warwick’s 40,000 customers were out of power.

As of Wednesday morning, Graves said 21,000 Warwick customers were still out of power, but Wednesday was a “hot spot” of work.

Armstrong said the station began receiving warning calls at around 5:30 a.m., but the storm was right behind beginning sometime just after 6 a.m.

Both Armstrong and Avedisian said they were “flooded” with calls in the early morning of constituents asking what happened to the power and when it was going to be fixed.

“When people don’t have power that adds to the anxiety of any situation,” Avedisian said. “We have just been asking people to be patient and understanding.”

Armstrong said that for the most part he has found that Warwick residents have been very understanding.

“They know that everyone is facing these problems,” he said.

Armstrong’s department received plenty of calls, mostly concerning trees that had fallen onto houses, but said it could have been a lot worse. Members of his team had been out all day trying to assist the Department of Public Works and National Grid in tree removal.

Avedisian even noted that construction crews for the Apponaug circulator and the Potowomut Fire Station were able to continue work as usual.

One thing both parties were happy to see is that despite a good portion of traffic lights out and before a police detail was assigned to nearly 20 intersections, there hadn’t been any major accidents.

“People have been really paying attention with the lights out, letting people pass when they don’t really need to,” Avedisian said.

Despite the general optimism from Avedisian and Armstrong, they also know there will be a lot of work moving forward. Some of the hardest hit neighborhoods were Governor Francis Farms and the Twin Oak plat.

“With a canopy of trees and 80-mile winds, this is what you could expect,” he said.

When passing those streets that had trees completely blocking a roadway, Armstrong would make a note of it, then call it in so in case of an emergency his trucks would be “rerouted as quickly as possible” to avoid impassable roads.

Armstrong had also kept track on the status of the city’s nursing homes and other healthcare facilities. He said that they all should have generator power, but the department was making routine calls to each site throughout the day to check on their status.

“The biggest concern now,” Avedisian said, “is power lines wrapped up in tree limbs. When people start moving things that can be dangerous.”

For those cleaning up their yards Avedisian encourages residents with debris to bag it up and leave it on the curb. The city will be having pick-ups over the next several weeks as residents bring their debris curbside. They said that it would most likely take nearly a month for all the debris to be picked up by the city.

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