There was no easing into winter for local highway departments, as two storm fronts back-to-back dumped two feet of snow or more across the region in two days.
The southern edge of the state was hardest hit – particularly the town of New Ipswich, which the National Weather Service has reported with the highest snow total of the state, 36 inches.
Rindge also peaked near the top of the chart, with a recorded 33 inches.
After the storm dissipated Tuesday, the region is not expected to see snow again until Friday, and that is not expected to accumulate, according to the National Weather Service’s long-term forecast.
That’s a relief for local road crews, who said the clean up from Winter Storm Ezekiel will take twice as long as typical storm, as crews struggled to keep up with the swiftly accumulating snow.
“It’s tough,” Seth MacLean, Peterborough’s Assistant Director of Public Works said Wednesday. “We do the best we can for what we have for limited staff. Our guys will go until they can’t go any longer, essentially.”
Mason Road Agent Dave Morrison said that in addition to having not enough crew to maintain two shifts, the department was also plagued by mechanical problems and dealing with the slippery conditions themselves.
The town has four dump-truck sanders, but by the end of the storm, were only working with one, Morrison said, with the other three down with mechanical issues.
“Everyone had a problem even getting to work,” Morrison said.
MacLean said Peterborough, too, experienced loss of one of their vehicles, when one of their plows had a minor collision with another motorist. The crash only caused minor damage, but the plow was pulled for the night to ensure it was safe to drive, and another truck got stuck and had to be helped back onto the road.
MacLean said it’s typical after a major storm for the department to need between 10 and 12 hours after a storm to finish clearing and disposing of the snow. This storm will likely take twice that long, he said.
Highway crews weren’t the only ones struggling. The clogged roadways hindered emergency personnel who responded to medical calls.
The Antrim Highway Department plowed and sanded a driveway to help the Antrim Ambulance reach a patient on Gregg Lake Road Tuesday morning.
Fire Chief Marshall Gale said the ambulance received a medical call from the address at 5:52 a.m. Gale said the home’s long driveway had been plowed on Sunday, but was “impassible” after more snow fell through Tuesday morning, and ice had formed under the snow.
EMT Sherry Miller walked up to the house and made contact with the patient to ensure she was stable, and the ambulance contacted the Highway Department to plow the driveway.
“If the patient needed immediate transport,” Gale said, “we would have carried him out by hand on a stretcher.”
Gale said the Highway Department was quick to respond from their regular snow removal route and plowed and sanded, with help from SR Jones Excavating, who Gale said was on his way to finish cleaning up the driveway when the ambulance was summoned.
“By the time we got everybody on the scene and got things done, it was about twenty minutes,” he said.
Gale said that similar situations have happened in previous storms, and described the process as a “great collaboration” between the town departments on the scene. The patient was successfully transported to Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough for evaluation, Gale said.
A similar situation occurred in Mason. Morrison said he’d only arrived home and been able to get a half-hour’s sleep on Tuesday night, when he was awoken for an emergency call because the ambulance was unable to access a driveway on Old Ashby Road.
“Business must go on,” Morrison, who had only been able to snatch a few hours of sleep Tuesday night, said.
The storm also caused thousands of power outages throughout the state, though in the Monadnock Region, only about 500 customers were impacted. According to Eversource spokeswoman Kaitlyn Woods, Eversource responded to outages impacting 6,900 customers throughout the storm.
About 2,700 of those customers were able to get power back within minutes due to smart switch technology Eversource has installed on its electrical systems.
“Most of the outages we responded to were caused by tree limbs falling onto our power lines and car crashes involving utility poles,” Woods wrote in an email to the Ledger-Transcript. “In addition to securing the resources we need to be there for our customers, we prepare year-round for severe storms by investing in a more resilient, self-healing, smart grid and in our robust tree trimming programs.”
In Mason, the elementary school remained closed on Wednesday due to road conditions, despite Milford High School, where students attend after fifth grade, re-opening.
ConVal Regional School District, the Jaffrey-Rindge Cooperative School District and the Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative School district extended their Thanksgiving vacation by two additional days, but were back in session on Tuesday.
Monadnock Ledger-Transcript reporter Abbe Hamilton contributed to this story.