Armageddon...not this time
Rick Crenca looked out his window. It was Monday night and forecasters were calling for the snow to start flying at 1 a.m. Tuesday morning. It was starting to rain, but there was no white stuff. He thought he ought to get some sleep, but that didn’t come easily. He was thinking of snow and what he’d need to do when it came.
“You know how it is when you’ve got something the next morning,” Crenca said.
He kept wondering when the snow would start. Sleep evaded him.
Finally, the director of public works drove to his office and cat-napped on his couch.
“I figured at least I’d be here when it started,” he said Tuesday morning as he set off to assess conditions.
Wet heavy flakes were falling rapidly, but for the exception of a white coating, Sandy Lane was clear.
“This is not bad. I was expecting Armageddon,” he said, heading for Apponaug.
Crenca called in crews at about 4:30 a.m. With sanitation and recycling collections delayed a day, those drivers were put on plows. In addition, water and sewer authority drivers were put on trucks. In all, Crenca was in command of a fleet of 72 pieces of equipment that included 18 private contractors. It was 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night before crews called it a day.
Tuesday morning, Crenca was going to check conditions in Cowesett that can be tricky because of its hills and higher elevation that generally gets more snow. The Apponaug Circulator was bare pavement. The state had done a good job of salting roundabouts and clearing what little snow stuck.
“We give it one hit right away,” Crenca said as he turned onto Diamond Hill Road. “Both lanes were open. We had no trouble until we approached Cowesett Road. A short dead end street – the sign was missing – hadn’t been touched. Crenca was on the radio. The word went out to the area plow.
Before the snow started accumulating the first of the storm related calls came in. A tree had fallen on Hope Street, bringing down wires and blocking the road. By the time a city crew arrived, a forestry team from National Grid had opened the road and placed cones to alert motorists and pedestrians of the wires.
It wasn’t too much longer before a woman called to report that a plow had pushed a ridge of snow in front of her driveway. She demanded that it be removed. Crenca wondered what the woman was thinking.
“When you plow snow, you push it to the side of the street,” he said.
Evidently, the caller wouldn’t let up. She wanted the situation taken care of and threatened to call Turn to 10.
“I should have given her the number,” Crenca said.
Equally frustrating was the call from a Warwick Neck resident, who reported he had been following a plow and it was stopped. It had pulled to the side of the road.
“I don’t know why he’s not moving,” Crenca told the caller.
Crenca said the man kept yelling and screaming. Finally, Crenca suggested he call a police officer, figuring the man would simmer down. He didn’t. The caller said he’d wait. As it turned out the plow driver was waiting to make another pass of his route.
Because of Kent Hospital, the first road the city plows is Toll Gate Road. The road was down to clear pavement, the snow pushed to the curb. A small front-end loader was working at the emergency department entrance.
Crenca was surprised to see it, quickly coming to the conclusion it was a hospital crew.
“That’s too new of a piece of equipment to be ours,” he said.
Calls came in flurries, averaging about one a minute during the storm, reported Denise Levine of the DPW. Mayor Scott Avedisian reported sporadic power outages with as many as 2,500 customers losing power because of a faulty transformer.
National Grid spokesman Ted Kresse said that, at its peak around 2 p.m., nearly 5,000 Warwick customers had lost power. That number had already decreased to just 33 customers as of 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday. Things were less severe in Cranston (which had just under 500 customers affected at its peak outage) and Johnston (which had just under 400 outages at its peak time). Statewide, outages peaked at 35,000 between 1 and 3 p.m. and were down to less than 3,500 as of 11:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Overall, Avedisian told Gov. Gina Raimondo, who stopped in at the emergency operations center at Fire Station 1 Tuesday afternoon, the city had been able to keep up with the storm as people had heeded the governor’s advice to stay off the roads.
However, when Raimondo greeted state DOT crews at the Midstate Department of Transportation Maintenance Facility in East Greenwich later that afternoon with coffee and donuts (from the one Dunkin Donuts she could find that remained open, she said), she reported more people had started heading out into the roadways during a mid-afternoon lull in the storm than was wise. That activity caused a spike in traffic accidents, according to Colonel Anne Assumpico, superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police and the director of the Rhode Island Department of Public Safety.
From the time the storm broke out in the late evening, early morning hours on Monday and until about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, there were only six traffic accidents in Rhode Island, none of them too severe, Assumpico said.
However, once the snow let up and people felt like they could venture from their homes, there were another six accidents in just about one hour, including a car that fully rolled over (though no serious injuries were reported).
Raimondo eventually extended the tractor-trailer ban until 8 p.m. on Tuesday evening and urged everyone to simply stay inside and wait out the storm.
Crenca, who worked in the Planning Department before being recruited to succeed David Picozzi in public works, said he is into the job. Before working for Warwick he had headed the public works department in North Kingstown. With a far larger crew to oversee, Crenca likes the challenge.
As for snow and how it had transformed Warwick, Crenca was not impressed by the winter scene.
“I look at it as white dirt,” he said.
