Power Expected to Be Returned to Walpole by 3 p.m.

As of 12 p.m. Tuesday, about 500 residents in Walpole were without power from Hurricane Sandy.

NSTAR is hoping to restore power to those customers by 3 p.m. today, according to Walpole Town Administrator Michael Boynton.

“Still working on power," he said. "We do know that there are several customers in town that still don’t have power. With a handful of exceptions, those appear to be primarily isolated cases with the individual services from the house to the street impacted versus entire neighborhoods.”

“I know NSTAR is actively trying to shoot to have everything turned back on by 3 p.m. this afternoon. I don’t know that they’ll actually reach that with every individual home, but certainly the overwhelming majority of town will be back by then,” he said.

Walpole fared reasonably well throughout the storm with only about 15-percent of the town losing power at one time. Emergency responders worked tirelessly trying to clear roads, put out numerous transformer fires and assist residents.

Today they are focusing on assessing the damage and cleaning up the mess Sandy left behind.

“We had a little bit of a flood situation this morning with a couple of the bands of heavy rain that came through. But that’s all been mitigated. So we’re really looking at the clean up aspect at this point,” said Boyton. “Fortunately, it’s certainly not to the extent that we had last year with the two big storms that we had then.“

Boynton said officials are looking to see if any town buildings were damaged during the storm.

He also said that Halloween will not be affected by the aftermath of the hurricane.

“No changes. Halloween is still on," said Boynton.