DEERFIELD — When the powder began to fall Thursday afternoon, some county residents may have had flashbacks to the major October Snow Storm of 2011 that knocked out the region’s power grid for days.
But as of 10 a.m. Friday, only about 200 Franklin County residents were still in the dark. Deerfield, with 73, and Colrain, at 53, had the most outages, according to Eversource.
“After yesterday’s snow and rain, we’re still dealing with scattered outages as limbs keep breaking under the weight of the snow on trees that still have leaves on the branches,” said Eversource spokeswoman Priscilla Ress. “Customers started losing power at about 5 p.m., and the outages went from west to east, where there was still plenty of foliage on the trees, then moved north as snow kept continuing building up on the trees in the Franklin County towns of Leyden, Colrain, Deerfield, Montague and Shelburne, as well as some smaller, scattered outages in nearby towns. The challenge for our crews restoring power is that as we clear trees and make repairs, trees continue to fall, especially in heavily wooded areas.”
Ress said all power is expected to be restored by 3 p.m.
The storm certainly appeared to catch many off guard, with trees and wires reported down in almost every community, a house fire in Colrain caused by downed wires, and multiple car crashes on Interstate 91 and Routes 5 and 10.
Greenfield Department of Public Works director Don Ouellette said his crews ended up working until 4 a.m., mainly clearing fallen trees.
“We had about 20 to 25 trees or large branches down, but it’s pretty well cleaned up now,” he said. “I still have crews out working, and there are still some trees up in power lines. We’re waiting for Eversource to get those clear.”
Ouellette said the town put a little salt down, and the snow changing to rain around 8 p.m. helped keep the roads clear.
Ouellette said the storm had similar characteristics to the 2011 storm, but wasn’t nearly as bad.
“That was a significantly heavier, longer duration storm,” he said. “It was worse than a hurricane with the number of trees we had down when I worked in Wayland at that time.”