Fire Chief Breaks Down the Power Outage

If you lost power Thursday morning, for a couple of minutes or a couple of hours or longer, you were not alone.

In the wake of consistent rain, powerful storms and high winds, hundreds of residences went without power for much of the morning, chief Scott Gilman said. Almost all of those residences have power now.

As many as 353 residential structures were without power as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, including a 140-unit apartment building. Only 12 remained without power as of 2:20 p.m. Thursday, almost all of them the only residence connected to the grid by a particular power line.

In order to restore power as quickly as possible, the fire department made about 50 runs between 5:14 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. Thursday. To put that figure in context, the department made more than 100 runs during a 24-hour stretch during the ice storm in February, “and I’ve seen as many as 150 runs,” Gilman said.

Some of the major damage Gilman noted included trees falling onto houses off Arliss Drive, Clifton Avenue, Edgewater Drive and Lakeland Avenue, and a roof that blew off an apartment building off Detroit Avenue.

Late Friday afternoon, police had blocked off the intersection of Franklin Boulevard and Blossom Park Avenue, near , to allow a crew to cut apart still another felled tree.