We’ve got those snow-blowing blizzard-blasting no-lights hurry-up-Eversource stuck-inside bread-and-milk winter-weary enough-of-this-insanity blues again.
Spring in the Tri-Town couldn’t feel any farther away from us than it does right now. Residents in Marion, Mattapoisett, and Rochester have lost their power – again – and, without a doubt, their patience along with it.
Mother Nature has sided with the groundhog sending us not one, but three Nor’easters within two weeks. As tree limbs fall around us so do our dreams of an ending to winter; as wires come down, so do our spirits.
Again, the Tri-Town emergency dispatch radio chatter was constant with reports of trees blocking roads, power outages, and cars stuck in the snow—same situations, only the street names and dates have changed.
Rochester was first to open up an emergency warming station around mid-day Tuesday. By noon, most of Marion was again without power, and half of Mattapoisett and Marion were forced into power-saving mode on their smart phones and tablets. By dark, Marion and Mattapoisett in collaboration had opened an emergency shelter at ORR.
As of press time, 70 percent of Mattapoisett still sits in the dark, 54 percent of Marion is stuck with no Wi-Fi, and over in Rochester 47 percent are still walking into rooms flipping on light switches out of habit and then remembering that they have no electricity.
The storm was still in progress by the time we at The Wanderer ‘put this baby to bed’ Tuesday night, so we have no official wind gust strengths or snow totals to report to you for this week’s edition. But what we can tell you is this: next Tuesday, March 20, is the first day of spring. — just five days away from the release of this week’s print edition.
There are still some hurdles ahead of us next week with some nighttime temps dipping into the teens early on but, even as the snow still falls, Tri-Town is melting into spring. So hold tightly to the sides of this same boat we find each other in as we sail into spring and then into summer, and remember this in August while we’re complaining about the heat and the drought.
“Complain about summer? Not me!” say us all.
Got photos of the storm? Send them to us (along with photo credit information) at news@wanderer.com so we can print them in next week’s edition.
By Jean Perry