Isaias Socks City; Close To 20% Lose Power; Trees Toppled; Clean-Up Begins

New Haven emerged from shuttered homes in the last hours of daylight Tuesday to survey the wreckage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias’s 63 mile-per-hour winds — and to begin the work of cleaning up. 

Crews will be busy on Wednesday.

From Donna Drive to Edgehill Road to Newhall Street to Ray Road, trees toppled, blocking streets, cracking cars, barging into some homes, one particularly unlucky abode on Harrison Street, as fire crews raced around nonstop. As of 8:35 p.m., the city recorded 196 downed trees with electrical wires.

At that point, 11,929 households, or close to 20 percent of the city, were without power.

The early winds ripped off a section of the roof at police headquarters, requiring some scurrying to protect documents and machines from the water.

At 311 Newhall St., a ​“tree fell on a male victim,” causing ​“very serious leg injuries,” Fontana reported.

By 7 o’clock, after the storm passed and the skies cleared, people poured outside, some with chainsaws, to clear away cars or blocked sidewalks. In the clear, cool sunset hours, a sense of communal relief mixed with wonder at Mother Nature’s power.

United Illuminating crews planned to work throughout the night. Then in the morning, city public works and parks crews and city-hired contractors, who went home after 16 hours on the job, will resume the work of clearing the parks and the streets of hundreds of fallen trees and innumerable branches.

The storm peaked around 4 p.m., when the winds hit their 63 mile-per-hour high, according to city emergency management chief Rick Fontana.

A drama unfolded near the storm’s peak, around 3:40 p.m., when the city received a report of a sailboat losing water with possible people on board. Firefighters went out on the Nathan Hale fire boat and returned the capsized boat to a dock by New Haven Terminal, according to Fontana. It turned out the boat had broken loose from the Pequonnock Yacht Club and did not have any people on board.

Beaver Hills Alder Jill Marks surveyed the neighborhood to report back to public works for help on Wednesday. She found downed trees throughout the area, from Colony Road to Bellevue Road to the Boulevard. She advised people to be patient on clean-up day as city crews attend to all the damage.

Shayna Reeves, Madison Dortche, and Lawrence Grayson were at the Edgewood Duck Pond at dusk feeding bread to a grateful gathering of fowl. ​“The power’s out,” Reeves reasoned. ​“We might as well do something.”

Shortly after 1 p.m. the early winds toppled the bulk of a decades-old towering Norway Maple in this reporter’s backyard — falling just shy of crushing a wooden compost bin that has unofficially served at times as the New Haven Independent’s assignment desk (at rear right in photo).

A reader described the scene earlier in the day at Lawrence and Orange, where a tree limb fell onto the road (pictured above): ​“The pail loader approached at a high rate of speed, slowed to assess, accelerated to ramming speed and rammed the tree over into the sidewalk. It then did a massive karate chop on top of the tree, presumably to compact it for passers by or for cleanup, or because it was really fun to do that.”