Storm brought down trees and poles, but not spirits, as we did without

It’s been a long week for all in the Northwest Corner. The thunderstorm that wreaked havoc across the area last Tuesday night, June 10, left many without power, phones, cable, some even without water, for days. The storm damage is extensive, including many downed trees, limbs, branches and telephone poles that shattered homes and property across the region. Then on Friday, unrelated to the storm, the Water Street bridge between Falls Village and Amesville was unexpectedly closed for safety concerns. But the good news is that there were no major injuries, and no fatalities, reported as a result of the storm.

Over the weekend, friends, families, acquaintances, even folks standing next to one another in the checkout line at the convenience store, were exchanging stories of the storm. Some were still without power, or phones, or cable, but they often found ways to look at the bright side, considering that other parts of the country are experiencing natural disasters, such as the flooding in Iowa, that are not so quickly abating. However, those who lost one, or many, old trees and sustained damage to their homes face a long and expensive cleanup, one that will keep our area town crews, tree companies and contractors busy for some time to come.

The town crews, and the crews from Connecticut Light & Power, are to be commended for their immediate and tireless responses. Many were out all night, for several nights, taking turns when necessary to keep up the work of getting the infrastructure up and running again. They will be at it for weeks to come, as we can tell by the cut-up trees still waiting at the side of the road for pickup and disposal. When those same trees and poles brought down wires with them, and many did, those sites naturally took top priority in all the crews’ schedules, and the cleanup had to be done very carefully and professionally to prevent injury and further disaster. We all still need to travel with care, watching for limbs that may somehow find their way into the road again.

Such circumstances can, and probably should, encourage us to reflect on our own vulnerability in the face of nature. One quick storm, and parts the area were brought to a complete standstill. One small portion of our community whose schedule was delayed as a result of the power outage due to the storm, as our readers may have noticed, was the newspapers published by The Lakeville Journal Company: The Lakeville Journal, The Millerton News and The Winsted Journal. Portions of downtown Lakeville, where our corporate office houses our computers, processors, film camera and printing press, were without power for more than 30 hours; ours was down from about 10 p.m. Tuesday night to about 10 p.m. Wednesday night.

Wednesday is our heaviest production day, when we compose the bulk of The Lakeville Journal and The Millerton News, after having done about eight pages of the second sections of the two newspapers on Tuesday. For both papers, the page count this past week was 66 pages, including Compass (28 for Millerton and 38 for Lakeville), and all those pages have to be written, copy edited, composed and then put together to run on the press.

Some may be wondering why we don’t have generators to keep the presses rolling in such circumstances. However, perhaps surprisingly, it is a rare occasion that the power is out for such an extended time in the center of Lakeville, and the cost of maintaining enough generators to power our lights, computers, processors and the Web printing press is prohibitive for a small-town weekly newspaper group. In the past 10 years, only one other time has an extended power outage affected downtown Lakeville on a Wednesday, and even then it was only about 10 hours, not 24.

Our goal is always to publish on time, and every week has its own set of challenges, which we usually overcome. It is extraordinary indeed for us to be unable to meet our deadlines, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. A storm story and those weekly stories that were ready to go were put up on our Web site late Wednesday afternoon, only because our production coordinator was able to pull a few computers out of our Lakeville office and reinstall them into our much smaller Millerton office, which still had power. He and the editors processed the material for the Web site, material which would then go into the papers once the power returned, to get the news out as soon as possible for our readers.

All the staff of the newspapers, from the editors to the reporters to the production, office and financial staff, collators and drivers, stepped up and put in extra hours once the power returned, helping out across the departments to accomplish in one day what usually takes two. Thanks to them all for the monumental effort, and also to David Maffucci of Visionary Computer in Lakeville (our next-door neighbor and Apple computer genius, in the truest sense of the word), who found a way to retrieve lost work from a server that was damaged by the power outage. If Maffucci hadn’t been able to make that server function, we would not have been able to produce the papers quite as planned once the power came up.

Our apologies for the delay last week; our hope is that there never be any delay in getting the news out to our readers. We hope all of you recover from the storm quickly, and that we as a group don’t have to face such a situation again any time soon. One thing we knew, however, in the Northwest Corner, is that we were not in this alone, and mutual support helped all of us make it through a difficult week. To all our readers in those towns hardest hit: Share your storm stories with us, and we’ll be glad to run them on the letters pages and on our Web site, tcextra.com.