Lower Cape Raked By Historic Blizzard

It was one for the record books.

The historic snowstorm that blasted the region Monday left most of the Lower Cape without power for an extended period of time and closed schools for multiple days as officials continued to clean up scores of downed trees, miles of utility wires and tons and tons of heavy, wet snow.

Heavy snow and wind shrouded the area through most of Monday, severely impeding travel and felling trees onto houses, cars and wires. Local radio stations went dark. Live wires lay on roads. The majority of power outages throughout the state were concentrated on Cape Cod and other coastal areas, according to a Feb. 23 Eversource press release.

While the Cape didn’t see the massive precipitation totals that other parts of southern New England experienced (like the record 41 inches recorded in Fall River), the wind gusts more than made up the difference. A reported 12 inches fell in at least part of Brewster, with 7 inches in Harwich and 5.5 inches in Chatham. But winds on the Cape gusted to as much as 77 miles per hour, according to Eversource. 

And by Monday morning, Chatham Municipal Airport was one of 15 regional airports across both Massachusetts and Rhode Island that had reached blizzard criteria, namely visibility of 1/4 mile or less and wind speeds of 35 mph or higher.

By Tuesday morning, 164,000 people were without power on the Cape, of about 230,000 customers in the southern area of Massachusetts, said Doug Foley, Eversource’s president of electric operations during a press conference in Yarmouth.

“This is a slow-moving, long-duration storm, and the difficult travel conditions we’re seeing, especially on the Cape, are making restoration more challenging,” Foley said in the Feb. 23 press release.

It would be a multi-day restoration, according to Foley, as Eversource sent helicopters, drones and hundreds of employees to the area to assess damage and restore power. More than 1,400 damage events, incidents like downed wires that required response by Eversource had occurred by Tuesday, according to an alert from the town of Orleans.

“Same challenges that everybody had — our ability to get out in blizzard-like conditions and do our job was nearly impossible, and we did what we could do safely,” Foley said Tuesday.

Nearly all of Brewster remained without power (99.8% of Eversource customers) into Tuesday morning. In Harwich, that figure was 78.6%; in Orleans, it was 98.8% In Chatham, 94% of the town remained without power into Tuesday morning, as several people flocked to the personal care site at the community center to warm up and charge devices. 

Monomoy Regional School District, Nauset Public Schools and Cape Cod Regional Technical High School all closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Multiple shelters opened as the storm and power outages continued across the Cape. The shelter in Eastham at Nauset Regional High School eventually closed due to capacity and heating issues, but a regional shelter opened at Cape Tech, Route 124 in Harwich. And on Tuesday, Gov. Maura Healey lifted a travel ban she had issued the previous afternoon to Barnstable, Bristol, Plymouth and Dukes counties. Meanwhile, the Orleans Police Department reported midafternoon Tuesday that no gas stations in town were dispensing fuel.