SPRINGFIELD, Vt. (WCAX) – Almost all of the electricity has been restored in Springfield after a powerful storm whipped through the town Wednesday, knocking out power to thousands of residents and businesses.
The sound of chainsaws filled the streets in Springfield Thursday, about 24 hours after high winds sent trees toppling to the ground.
“The breeze came up and it started pouring,” said Cathe DeMarco, who was inside her home when a massive tree narrowly missed a direct hit. “All of a sudden I started hearing cracks.”
The branches did some minor damage to the house and blew out the back window of her car in the driveway. DeMarco says it all happened very fast. “There were so many trees back here that were making noise as they broke.”
A few streets away, other trees went down near two other homes, causing damage.
“Right away, we started getting fire calls for power outages and live wires down. We had a total of about 28 different fire calls just within a few minutes,” said Springfield Fire Chief Paul Stagner. At the height of Wednesday’s outages, more than 3,000 people were without electricity. “There is no way of knowing — myself included and my trained personnel have no way of knowing — what’s live and what’s not.”
Power crews made quick work turning the lights back on and there were no injuries reported.
DeMarco has a lot of cleaning up to do but acknowledges things could have been much worse. “Everybody was fine here so we are lucky and I just hope everybody else was as lucky,” she said
Fire officials say they contacted the National Weather Service to investigate exactly what type of weather event it was.