Thunderstorms and high winds took out power to nearly 200 Jaffrey residents this weekend, during a regional tornado warning.
Michael Clair, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s monitoring station in Gray, Maine, said Monday the warning went out after meteorologists tracked early signs of rotating winds on radar over the New England area. However, at this time, reports don’t indicate a tornado fully formed, though there were severe thunderstorms and winds high enough to cause damage and take down trees in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Clair said southern New Hampshire has little radar coverage on the ground, so it’s hard to determine the severity of the storm that stuck there.
The town of Jaffrey had multiple power outages, a total of 181. Police had to shut down an intersection at Wolf’s Way and Route 124 on Friday evening due to downed trees, according to police administrative assistant Denise Chatel. According to Clair, tree damage is usually caused when winds are in excess of 58 miles per hour.
There was also damage caused by high winds on Mountain Road in Jaffrey, which caused the majority of Jaffrey’s blackouts, according to Kaitlyn G. Woods, a spokesperson for Eversource.
“On Mountain Road in Jaffrey, strong wind gusts brought trees onto our power lines causing three broken utility poles and 13 broken crossarms, as well as several damaged transformers,” Woods said.
Across the state, severe thunderstorms knocked out power to approximately 10,000 Eversource customers, Woods said. About 2,700 customers were only without power for a matter of minutes before it was able to be restored through the systems “smart switches,” which allow Eversource employees to remotely isolate power outages and reroute power from a backup source.
However, the amount of response required from the storms resulted in about 400 customers still without power through noon on Saturday, and lingering into the evening.
“Our crews worked as quickly and safely as possible under our COVID-19 pandemic plan to get the power back for all of our customers impacted by 6:05 p.m.,” Woods said.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.