Proper Planning Helped Mitigate Sandy's Impact

Most of the damage Collingswood sustained from Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy likely happened within a 45-minute window last Monday night, estimates Mayor James Maley.

“I think it’s when the wind shifted,” he said.

In surveying the wrath of Sandy on public and private property throughout the borough for the better part of last week, Maley has seen some patterns emerge.

One of them is the idiosyncratic way in which most of the larger trees uprooted by the storm all fell toward the Southeast.

“When [the wind] shifted and blew hard the other way,” Maley said, “it was like rocking [a loose] tooth.”

As of Friday, the hardest-hit areas in town that were still hazardous because of downed wires and fallen tree limbs included Coulter Avenue and the intersection of Bettlewood and Harding Terrace, he said.

Removing a huge fallen tree on Fern Avenue Thursday proved it, when workers discovered a still-live wire beneath the wreckage.

Over the weekend, the effects of power outages were still observable throughout the borough. Maley estimates that some 1,000 households may have struggled with electricity issues throughout the storm, and parts of Haddon Avenue in the area of the LumberYard were still battling through when he spoke with Patch on Friday.

“Then the West side at times was like a silent movie with the flickering of the lights,” Maley said, “but we didn’t really lose power anywhere.”

Maley said he’s “been in constant contact with PSE&G” to bring utility service workers to the borough, and that he’s tried to visit trouble spots within the borough “at least once a day, a couple times a day.”

The worst of the storm came in the middle of the night last Monday, Maley said, and for “those two hours we were running everywhere.” He recalls leaving Jerry Mazzola and Ken Bere’s Browning Road home only to see “the sparks on Coulter” Avenue as  that block lost power.

“Monday, at times, it felt like our worst fears were being realized,” Maley said.

“We were scrambling to keep up with all the trees going down and power getting knocked out. We thought we were never going to be able to keep up with it.”

Coming together

What’s helped Maley pull through is the recognition that “folks in town have been great,” including Vitality Fitness opening up its showers to people who didn’t have a place to bathe and Salon Verde offering free shampoos for the same. The public library and community center were both opened for extended hours throughout the weekend to give residents Internet and electricity access.

“I’ve never had areas of town with power outages for almost a week,” he said. “It’s just impressive how the staff, police, the fire, DPW, our clerical people [responded],” he said; “neighbors helping everybody, running extension cords.”

In all, Maley said, he was fairly satisfied with the way the borough was prepared for the storm, but said the lessons he will take from it will involve improving communication and building up for a longer potential outage.

“We feel that there’s some communications issues that we’re going to address between ourselves, but also how we let people know,” he said. “The pre-storm meetings we had led to a really organized effort; we were satisfied with it. We’ve got to plan for how we’d carry it longer term.”

'We got a little lucky'

Collingswood Fire Chief Keith Davis said that departmental preparation “paid dividends mitigating some of the potential hazards,” such as flooding. Camden County government lowering dams in Cooper River helped more than a bit, he said—as did the fact that the borough only absorbed 4 to 5 inches of rain instead of the anticipated 10.

“From my standpoint it went very, very smooth considering some of the devastation this storm had caused,” he said. “We got a little lucky because we didn’t have any flooding.”

Partnering police and fire resources in the Collingswood Fire Department, which served as a makeshift base of operations for the storm, “really did work,” Davis said, enabling emergency workers to share incident responses without “doubling up on manpower.”

“The response was immediate and we really didn’t run into any issues,” he said.