Storm Downs Trees; 700 Lose Power

Winds reached 56 miles per hour in town overnight, downing at least 15 trees citywide and plunging the City Point neighborhood into darkness.

Meanwhile, officials were scrambling past midnight to deal with two storm-unrelated matters: a busload of Hillhouse High students stranded off a Baltimore highway, and a piercing alarm in a bank-owned home that was keeping upper Westville awake.

The overnight windstorm left 700 people without power and felled at least 15 trees that took out utility wires, according to city emergency management chief Rick Fontana. Patrol cops from the overnight shift were held over this morning to guard those locations. (Statewide, 160,000 locations were reported to have lost power.)

City Point got hit the worst, with basically the whole neighborhood still without electricity Monday morning, Fontana said.

He praised the job done overnight doing by cops, parks department crews and public works.

“Those guys did an unbelievable job,” Fontana said. ​“Suddenly we need a payloader at 1 in the morning —we have to call people in their houses, get them out of bed, get them to the site, calling in multiple tree crews. And they do it.”

Sound School on City Point is closed Monday. Generators kicked on during the power outage and ​“the fish are OK,” said schools spokesman Will Clark.

All other public schools are open. The storm damage has complicated some of the bus routes, Fontana said.

Meanwhile, a busload of Hillhouse High School students taking a college-visit trip were stranded for hours off I‑95 Exit 38 in Maryland when their bus broke down.

The bus had been rented from Kelley Transit Services of Torrington. Twenty-eight students were on the bus, headed for Washington, D.C, when an alternator belt broke. A repair crew came and failed to fix the problem, and the students were told Sunday night that they would have to wait at least another six or seven hours for a replacement bus.

The school system was not involved in planning the trip. But Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo and school system transit chief Teddi Barra ​“worked the phones through the night” and succeeded in helping to get another bus to the scene hours later and adjusting hotel plans, Clark reported. He said the trip is back on track for Monday.

Meanwhile, upper Westville neighbors enlisted their alder, Darryl Brackeen, their top neighborhood cop, Lt. Manmeet Colon, and then officials from the Livable City Initaitive (LCI) to try to get a deafening alarm to stop blaring from an empty house on Conrad Drive near the Yale Golf Course. It took 20 hours.

The alarm started disturbing neighbors at 1 a.m. blocks away on Stevenson, Byron, and Whittier, according to one of the neighbors, Glenn Schulman.

The house was formerly owned by the family of Mayor Toni Harp. A bank now owns it; it’s for sale.

The city couldn’t find anyone from the bank or management company to get the alarm turned off, according to Alder Brackeen. The alarm company said it couldn’t cut off the alarm without word from an owner. LCI couldn’t find a contact for an owner representative.Sunday night the alarm was still blaring every 30 minutes or so.

Finally, Brackeen said, someone convinced United Illuminating to cut the power. Beginning at 10 p.m., upper Westville got to sleep again.