The nor’easter that hit the Connecticut area beginning Saturday night combined 60 mph winds with torrential rain, leading to one death and causing school to close for three days and two-thirds of the town to lose power, as well as replacing the April 1 staff development day with a school day. In addition, the school year will now end on June 23.
According to a March 15 Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P) press release, over 110,000 customers lost electricity throughout the state. CL&P workers ultimately restored electric service to more than 50,000 customers by March 15.
The town’s biggest tragedy was the death of 39-year-old Jennifer Thibault of New Jersey. While she was driving on Park Lane, a tree fell on her car.
For Staples, the lost days of school may pose troublesome for some Advanced Placement (AP) classes, with only a month before AP testing begins in May.
“It is not likely that I can finish the curriculum,” Alan Jolley, an AP Calculus AB teacher, said. “There are topics that we haven’t covered. I will have to offer before school sessions to try to acquaint students with the material we haven’t been able to reach.”
Regardless of any extra days added to the third quarter, Jolley will still be behind on the curriculum.
“Extending the quarter or school year doesn’t do anything for me,” he said.
Jolley said that he wanted to get rid of the staff development day, giving him a chance to make up on one of the three days his classed missed.
According to Lis Comm, the 6–12 English Coordinator, the lost time is a larger problem for math and science classes.
“We teach skills and we do not have specific subjects to cover, unlike math and science classes that have to get through all subjects,” she said.
The lost time seems to be more difficult for math and science A.P. classes, which follow a strict curriculum and must cover a certain number of subjects each week to prepare students for the A.P. tests.
Aside from affecting A.P. classes and forcing the planned staff development day on April 1 to become a school day, the wind storm left a trail of downed trees and obvious destruction.
“There’s a big price tag [on storm repairs], but it comes down to what price tag you put on a life,” First Selectman Gordon Joseloff said at a March 16 press conference with “WestportNow.”
CL&P originally put forth a 99 percent plan, where it stated that 99 percent of homes in Westport would have power by Wednesday night. However the company announced that 500 customers would not have their power by midnight on Wednesday and that 100 would be out of power until Thursday.
The additional 100 were out of power because of individual lines taken down during the storm.
On mid-day March 20, CL&P announced that it had restored over 161,000 power outages and that none of the remaining were in Westport.
The company also announced that they had replaced 528 poles and 584 transformers, hung more than 61 miles of electrical wire and responded to about 1,200 9-1-1 calls since the beginning of the storm.
Throughout the week, on top of the many CL&P crews working on restoring power, there were several utilities crews from New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York and Canada all working around the clock to fix Connecticut’s power issue.
Many Staples students and other Westport residents found refuge at the public library, which had heat, light and Wi-Fi.
