Statement From Walpole PD on Hurricane Sandy

From the Walpole PD website.

Hurricane Sandy hit Walpole on Monday, causing a variety of problems and an increase in activity for Town departments. In anticipation for the storm, the Emergency Operations Center was staffed with representatives from each department to help coordinate responses, and extra staff was called in for essential personnel (i.e. police, fire, dpw).

All-in-all it was a smooth operation. The police department alone fielded more than 200 telephone calls (33 of which were 911). These calls generated more than 60 unique incidents during the storms busiest period from 8am to 8pm. Calls came in rather steadily throughout the day until about 3pm when the call volume skyrocketed to about 30 calls per hour. When you consider the average call is a little more than 1 minute in length, that means calls were pretty much non-stop during this hour.

The majority of the calls were the basic storm damage; trees down, wires down etc. Washington Street, in South Walpole, experienced the most wide-spread outages as a transformer came crashing to the ground in flames at roughly 3:30pm. A large section of Washington St. had to be shut down to traffic, and an even larger section of the power grid had to be shut-off so the electric company could solve the problem. In the photo you can see a transformer burning in the background as Officer Moses braves the weather to stop traffic.