The region was hit by isolated pockets of high winds and rain Thursday evening, which caused downed trees and wires and power outages in several towns.
“It was a strange thing, almost like a straight-line wind storm,” said Antrim Fire Chief Marshall Gale. “It was very, very localized. We had a short bit of extreme weather around Jameson Avenue and West Street, where strong winds took down trees and wires and snapped a utility pole.”
Gale said there were live wires on West Street for a period of time until Eversource could respond.
“Obviously, Eversource was pretty busy, and they got here as quick as they could,” Gale said. “The most dangerous part of the situation was that all the wires that were down were still energized. We put up cones around the scene and just had to kind of babysit it — people seem to have the need to walk up close to live wires.”
Gale said there were some local traffic issues later in the evening as families headed to Great Brook School for the eighth-grade graduation, but that “everyone figured it out.”
“We were lucky; there were no accidents or anything like that,” Gale said.
During the height of the storm, Peterborough had 328 customers without power; Antrim, 78; Lyndeborough, 184; and Temple, 19. According to Eversource, there were fewer than a dozen customers still without power in Peterborough and Temple on Friday morning.
Meteorologist Cyrena Arnold of Francestown said that Thursday’s storm activity was “a very well-forecasted event.”
“Yesterday evening’s storm was a rare event. It’s not one that happens very often in New England … it’s the type of thing we may see once every one or two summers,” Arnold said Friday morning. “The National Weather Service was saying four days beforehand that there was a very good risk of severe thunderstorms and that the primary hazard, as of the day before, was straight-line winds and tornadoes. As it got closer, the tornado risk was upgraded to a 5% area, which means there is a 5% chance of tornadoes happening within a 25-mile radius of that area.”
Arnold said the forecasted “5% area” covered the entire state of Vermont as well as western New Hampshire, including parts of the Monadnock Region.
“We see those percentage rates, we know we are going to get something, somewhere, and those events came through pretty much as they were forecasted,” Arnold said. “The damage in Vermont looks more like tornadic circulation and not straight-line winds, but we won’t know for sure until the National Weather Service sends a storm survey team out to verify that damage on the ground. Then we will be able to determine if a tornado happened, and, if so, how strong it was. Indications are looking pretty certain that it was a tornado, but we can’t be sure until they do the storm survey.”
Arnold said the NWS would most likely release the results of the storm damage in Vermont by Friday.
Fire Chief Ed Walker of Peterborough said for the most part, Peterborough and Sharon escaped any severe damage.
“We had a bunch of trees and wires down between Sharon and Peterborough, but nothing serious. We got lucky. We had a swath of trees down in Sharon around Route 124, Jarmany Hill Road, and Nashua Road, and in Peterborough, on Pine Ridge Road, and at the high end of Old Street Road, but that was about it,” Walker said. “There were no accidents or fires.”
Walker said the path of the storm was random.
“Jaffrey got no calls, and Hancock got no calls. It was very weird,” he said.
According to a social media post by the Wilton Fire Department, the department was dispatched to Lyndeborough to assist with a fire caused by a large tree falling on the residence during the storm. The Lyndeborough Fire Department quickly mitigated the situation. According to the post, Wilton FD used its ladder truck to check the roof of the residence for damage to the chimneys and solar panels. Eversource also responded to the scene to isolate the power from the pole to the residence.
