The storm brought down at least 200 trees in the city.
Chicopee Street in front of the Registry of Motor Vehicles flooded within minutes of the storm hitting the area on Tuesday July 26, 2011.Mayor Michael Bissonnette said he expects power to be restored by this evening to sections of the city hit by outages. The mayor noted that restoration efforts by Chicopee Electric Light -- assisted by crews from as far away as Braintree -- were going "better than expected," and that power had been restored to Westover Air Reserve Base. Customers in the Fairview and Prospect neighborhoods were still without power Wednesday morning.
Summer school classes at Fairview Veterans Memorial Middle School and Bellamy Middle School were cancelled Wednesday due to the power outage.
Bissonnette also took his outreach efforts to Facebook, penning a series of status updates soliciting information from residents. In one post, he wrote:
Looking for citizen updates on power outages and tree damage so we can review priority list at 6 am. Road clearing for emergency vehicles and restoring power are continuing to be addressed. Let me know your location and isisue. Also if you have power and can help someone who has an outage, please reach out to them.In response, one resident noted that side streets between College Street and Memorial Drive had remained flooded late into Tuesday evening. A Boulay Circle resident posted a comment saying that he'd helped clear trees from four neighbors' homes.
The storm brought down at least 200 trees in the city, Bissonnette said -- a count that doesn't include damage to Chicopee State Park on Burnett Road.
On Barbara Street in the city's Fairview neighborhood, limbs from two large trees fell on Judy Laino's property. One punched a hole through the roof of her home.
Laino said a number of her neighbors came to help clear the branches and make MacGyver-esque repairs to her home. One neighbor suggested fashioning several cookie sheets into a temporary roof patch.
"It was great, and everybody worked until it was out the way," she said.
Online reporter George Graham and assistant online editor Greg Saulmon contributed to this report.