Wednesday's Storm Led to Thursday's Outages

The telephone calls to Danbury's '311 service Thursday asked the obvious questions. When would power come back on, there are tree branches down on South Street, and then some new calls came in.

The first calls came from some of the 2,900 houses without power Wednesday night, but new callers picked up the phone Thursday morning. A transformer blew Thursday near Cottage Street in the Town Hill Avenue neighborhood, an event that happenened nearly 24 hours after the storm left town.

"We have about 300 people out right now, but we should have the power back by midnight," (Thursday,) said Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton.

Boughton said the violent storm picked up an air conditioner unit on the roof of Rogers Park Middle School, and then dropped it right through the school roof.

"Yup, we're probably going to need a new roof," Boughton said.

Jeff Preston, the community representative who answers the 311 telephone, said when he learns of an outage, he sends an e mail to the city's Storm Team 155 made up of one representative each from numerous city departments, such as, Forestry, the UNIT, Police Department, Fire Department and others.

"We essentially have a chat group," Preston said. "That way everyone's on the same page."

The main streets hit by the outages were Overlook Drive, South Street, Town Hill Avenue, Coal Pit Hill Road, Triangle Street, Foster Street and Mountainville Road.