Spared the worst of recent bad storms, the region is quick to help hard-hit areas
http://sentinelsource.com/articles/2008/07/25/news/local/free/id_316354.txt
Published: Friday, July 25, 2008
Southwestern New Hampshire “dodged a bullet this time,” said Doug Graham, the area’s highway
maintenance engineer for the N.H. Department of Transportation.
No area roads washed out in the heavy rains, Graham said, and the Southwestern N.H. Fire District
Mutual Aid log shows only a few trees fell on power lines, in Greenfield, Acworth, Harrisville and
Spofford.snip-->
Joe Sarcione, fire warden in Stoddard, speaks to fire personnel
Thursday afternoon at a staging area at the Hillsboro Fire Department.
Fire and rescue crews from five area towns spent three hours at the
site preparing to be dispatched to areas of the state most affected
by Thursday’s violent storms.Instead of pelting the Monadnock Region with heavy rains and high winds this week, Mother
Nature chose to bully Concord, Epsom and Deerfield. See related story on Page One.
Even though the worst damage was far from home, local emergency crews were poised and ready
to help the storm’s victims.
Fire and rescue crews from five area towns spent three hours Thursday organizing at a site
in Hillsboro and preparing to be dispatched to the Capital Region, where powerful thunderstorms
and a possible tornado ripped up houses and trees and left one woman dead.
Not knowing if they would be needed, the crews were prepared to stay all night and into the
next day if they had to, said Keene Deputy Fire Chief Mark R. Howard.
“We had a good idea it wasn’t very good over there,” Howard said this morning.
“We took water, extra clothes ... we truly thought we would be gone for a day or more.”
The crews — from Antrim, Peterborough, Keene, Stoddard and Sullivan — were requested by a
dispatch center in Concord, Howard said, and told to wait in Hillsboro for their orders.While they were there, they kept their eyes on the news reports coming out of the area,
and made several contingency plans.
“It was obvious they were having problems getting access because of the down trees, so we
were making sure the saws that we brought were in working order,” Howard said. The groups were
prepared to move together or individually, depending on the need. “If they called and said
‘We need a group with saws,’ we determined who has the most and we would send them.”
At about 4:30 p.m., “word was we were the next crews in, and we should have everybody organized,”
Howard said. “We were planning how we were going to feed the 35 people and how to provide a
place for 35 people to sleep if it hadn’t been assigned already.
“You try to be somewhat self-sufficient. If you’re not, you end up being a burden,” he said.
Area Red Cross volunteers are helping the families whose homes were destroyed by the storm,
according to Janet Kingsbury Warren, executive director of the N.H. West Chapter of the Red Cross
in Keene.Red Cross volunteers are performing damage assessments, and will set up a service center today,
where residents can go to start piecing their lives back together with help from various agencies.
“Instead of them going around to different agencies, we try to get it all under one roof,” Warren said.
“That’s something we learned here (in the floods of 2005) that it’s really good to do it that way rather
than have them going around to many different agencies.
“They are very traumatized.”
The Red Cross has also set up two shelters, in Epsom and Deerfield, and a mobile feeding crew
to serve hot meals to the rescue and relief workers and displaced families.The best way to contribute to the clean-up and recover effort is through the disaster relief fund,
Warren said.“We all remember what happened here (in 2005),” she said.
“We know the rest of the state came to help us, so we are trained and ready to help them.