WOODSTOCK — Missy Cunningham waged war against the weekend’s snow.
“Snowstorms are fabulous,” said the Hartford resident, who has lived in Vermont since 1962. “But this one attacked us.”
Cunningham and a friend stood on Elm Street in the heart of Woodstock Monday morning, commiserating about the weekend’s storm, which brought widespread power outages and over 20 inches of wet, heavy precipitation to parts of Windsor County.
The friend, Becky Brettell, had Cunningham beaten: Her home in Barnard was still without electricity, going on three full days.
“I actually like the quiet, though,” said Brettell, who’s lived in the state since ’54. “The only thing I hear is tinnitus in my ears.”
Actually, Brettell explained, there was also the sound of a chainsaw, which she wielded to forge a path back to town. Branches, broken in the storm, stood between her and civilization. Power tools proved the best way out.
As of Monday at 1 p.m., almost 5,600 customers in Vermont were still without electricity, according to Green Mountain Power, the state’s largest utility. The bulk of outages were clustered in Upper Valley towns such as Hartford, Hartland, Norwich and Woodstock.
Sheryl Gibson recalled standing outside her home in Woodstock at about 11 p.m. on Friday, watching the snow pile up, when an electrical transformer exploded.
“Ice-blue light lit up the entire yard,” she said on Monday, still shaken from the episode. “I came to find out a tree had hit the transformer.”
With the power knocked out, the water pump stopped working, and so toilets stopped flushing. And with five kids at home, Gibson had plenty of entertaining to do. Board games and snow wrestling passed the time, she said.
Once the nearby Woodstock Recreation Center regained power, Gibson trudged over to take a hot shower — as did many others still without electricity.
“I haven’t experienced a storm like that since the blizzard of ’78,” she said.
Mondays are always a busy day at the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock. But this Monday was especially busy.
“We call ourselves a dry bar,” joked Kathy Beaird, the library’s adult services director. “A lot of people are hanging out today. Everyone’s talking about what they had to do this weekend.”
Patrons complained of buying water and skipping baths, Beaird reported. One woman bragged about the number of pages she’d been able to read in 55 hours using only light from the sun and fireplace.
“We’re a community center. Absolutely,” said Liza Bernard, programming and marketing librarian at Norman Williams. “A lot of people don’t have a secondary source of heat. People can come here to get warm. They come here in the summer to cool off.”
At the nearby Yankee Bookshop, co-owner Kristian Preylowski had wondered on Saturday whether opening was feasible. He saw on social media that the business’s neighbors had power, so he made the trek from snowy Bridgewater and opened up the shop two hours late on the last Saturday before Christmas Eve.
“We were worried that we’d have to stay closed,” he said on Monday. “We rely on a strong end of year. Any day you lose, you feel it. But you’re also balancing safety.”
Once Preylowski opened the doors, business was “nonstop,” he said. Tourists in town flooded inside to browse the shelves and charge their phones.
Still, the storm was not without consequence. The delayed opening created a backup of shipments, work that carries over into the next week. Plus, Preylowski was still without power back home in Bridgewater.
