After a year of mind-bending weather, with ice storms, blizzards, tornadoes, a tropical storm and earthquake, the Halloween nor’easter was the most wicked storm of all.
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By 8 p.m., wet snow was blanketing the highway and whipping against Caro Lambert’s windshield.
It was October 29, 2011 – three hours into a fierce pre-Halloween snowstorm – and the speech pathologist was driving home from a workshop in Amherst.
The snow was piling up fast, and her 2002 Honda was one of the few cars on Route 9 in Belchertown. Everything was so quiet, so peaceful, Lambert recalled last week.
“Then I heard this horrific crack,” she said.
A huge tree slammed down on the car, crushing the front end and exploding the windows, with just a few feet separating Lambert from a gruesome death.
“I was lucky. Not a scratch or a bruise,” the 50-year old Belchertown resident said. “I could have been squashed like a bug.”
With Hurricane Sandy – another massive coastal storm – expected to arrive Sunday night, the first anniversary of the October nor’easter, nobody is rooting for a replay of last year’s ordeal.
“No. Not again,” said Wilmarie Grajales, 25, of Holyoke, who moved here from New York City less than 48 hours after last year’s storm.
“I took one look at the streets and went back to New York. I didn’t come back until August,” she said.
After a year of mind-bending weather, with ice storms, blizzards, tornadoes, a tropical storm and earthquake, the Halloween nor’easter was the most wicked storm of all.
With a crippling mix of wet snow and high winds, the storm plunged 3 million people into darkness on the East Coast that Saturday night, ravaging trees and power lines from Maryland to Maine.
On Sunday, the region woke up to a frozen, deforested landscape, with towering snowbanks, dangling electrical wires and fallen or mangled trees.
With snow totals reaching 2½ feet, the storm shattered records dating back to the 1880s for early season snowfall. But it was the storm’s timing – arriving during an unusually late foliage season, when many trees still had leaves – that magnified the tree damage, creating chain-reaction power outages.
In Western Massachusetts, nearly 250,000 people found themselves with no heat or electricity. In Springfield, school was canceled for a week. Gas stations, hardware stores and even doughnut shops were swamped.
Indeed, the search for morning coffee created a block-long traffic backup Monday at Dunkin’ Donuts in West Springfield.
“It was crazy. You saw lines in places you’d never seen them before,” said Joel Dorval, of Chicopee.
By mid-week, not much had changed.
Homeowners in Springfield, Longmeadow, Agawam and other communities were still waiting for power. Emergency shelters were still open.
Side streets remained blocked; trees were stooped or splintered into grotesque shapes.
“Everything looked different after the storm – everything was different,” said Chris Brown, 20, of Riverton Road, Springfield.
Recounting a week without heat, hot showers, television, the computers or even school, Brown said: “I missed everything.”
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“It was not a lot of fun,” added Shirley Morgan, 86, of Holyoke, whose week got off to a bad start when she broke her ankle several days before the storm.
At her nephew’s request, Morgan spent Saturday night in Palmer, sleeping on the floor with four other relatives in front of a fireplace.
The arrangement left something to be desired, Moran said.
“The next morning, I said to him, ‘Bring me home.’”
A few hours later, Morgan was thrilled to be back in Holyoke, where power had already been restored by the city’s Gas & Electric Department.
“We hardly lost anything,” Morgan recalled.
“I think my nephew didn’t get power back for five days.”
In Wilbraham, Michael C. Mannix discovered the joys of indoor camping. With his wife and daughter, the Springfield post office manger spent five nights sleeping in front of the fireplace.
“I slept in a recliner,” Mannix said, wincing at the memory.
Nine trees fell in his driveway during the storm; one very large tree also landed against his house.
“Our house used to be surrounded by trees – not anymore,” said Mannix, a former Holyoke city councilor. “You lose the shade, and you lose privacy.”
By Monday, the impact of the storm was becoming all too clear.
In Springfield, the scenes at local gas stations were reminiscent of the long, panicked lines from the 1970s Arab oil embargo, when the quest for gasoline became a national obsession.
To keep order, police were deployed at particularly busy gas stations, including at Breckwood and Wilbraham roads, St. James Avenue and Tapley Street, and Bay Street.
The temperature rebounded to the 50s by afternoon, but snowbanks lined many streets, some draped with downed telephone or electric wires.
By Monday afternoon, Natalia Navarro was forced to cancel her daughter’s first Halloween.
“It was too bad; I had a little Tootsie Roll (costume) for her,” Navarro, 19, recalled. “But this year, she’ll be going as a gnome.”
For many families, Halloween was replaced by Malloween, with hundreds of children paraded from shop to shop at the Holyoke Mall, getting candy from the staff.
“A lot of communities canceled Halloween, so the kids had nowhere else to go,” said William Rogalski, general manager of the mall.
The turnout was larger than expected.
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“It was insane; I don’t think anyone was 100 percent prepared for it,” he added.
I-Party, the Dedham-based party supply chain, had the opposite problem. The storm struck on the busiest weekend of the year, cutting power to a dozen stores, with four remaining closed into November.
Sales for the month dropped 12 percent from the previous October, a $2 million loss linked to the storm, the company reported.
In East Longmeadow, the collapsing power grid represented a different kind of business opportunity for Floyd Cumby, who picked up a fast $5,000 by breaking into two restaurants and a credit union early Sunday morning.
Alerted by a battery-operated alarm at the credit union, police responded – following a trail of money dropped by the suspect as they chased him through the snow.
In July, Cumby, 51, of Springfield, was sentenced to five years in state prison for the break-ins, which occurred while he was on probation for receiving stolen property.
The failure to quickly restore power turned into a debacle for Western Mass Electric Company, triggering a public backlash and a $4 million fine from state Attorney General Martha Coakley.
The public uproar was worse in Connecticut, where the president of Connecticut Light and Power, the state’s largest utility, was forced to resign three weeks after the storm.
For all the outrage, the sudden loss of basic necessities – lights, hot showers, warm food, cable television – also created a grudging appreciation for electricity and the role it plays in modern life.
“It’s true. You don’t really appreciate something like that (electricity) until it’s gone,” said Brandon Crespo, 18, of Indian Orchard, who found his Honda buried in snow to the windows Sunday morning.
For others, the ordeal reinforced the importance of family – especially relatives with fireplaces, snowblowers and hot showers.
“There’s only one thing I can’t live without, and it’s my family,” said Judy Gonzalez, 20, of Springfield. “And thank God, nothing happened to them.’
For Lambert, her close call on Route 9 was just the start of a week without heat, light, water, telephone or e-mail – a plight she shared with many Belchertown residents.
The accident gave her a perspective on the storm and its seemingly endless hassles.
“You realize what’s really important – I tried to call my father, and my brother and sister as soon as I got home,” she said. “I couldn’t get through.”
Her Honda, meanwhile, had been reduced to a junk sculpture on display at a local towing garage.
On Sunday, Lambert and her husband Paul went to retrieve her possessions. Route 9 was littered with fallen trees and abandoned cars. “It was a war zone,” she said.
To her relief, a scrapbook with pictures of her late mother, Ann, survived the crash without damage.
The garage’s owner seemed surprised to see her.
“He said, ‘You are one lucky lady. I’ve seen a lot of wrecks like this, and they don’t usually turn out this well.’”
Emilio Fusco
