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The National Weather Service forecast for Winchester added up to about 3.9 inches of rain from the Sept. 25 to Sept. 27 nor’easter, much of it due to fall on trees still carrying their summer leaves.
“We had people in on Saturday expecting the heavy rains and ... the leaves to come down and block the basins, but we didn’t have those problems,” said Robert LaBossiere, director of the Department of Public Works.
Through late Sunday night, two weather observers in town had measured 1.19 and 1.38 inches, according to totals compiled by the weather service. Woburn logged 0.97 inches. Boston passed 3.3 inches, and parts of Cape Cod and the South Coast topped 7 inches.
The wind did what the water didn’t. Winchester spent the weekend under a wind advisory calling for gusts of 40 to 50 mph, and peak gusts across most of the region landed between 45 and 55 mph, the weather service reported.
Beside a pond just north of the town center, those gusts snapped a willow’s trunk and left its raw, pale wood splintered to the sky. One of its long limbs lay flat in the grass beneath the power lines Monday afternoon.
Main Street first
Public Works crews spent Sept. 28 concentrating on Main Street, hauling branches and debris out of the road, LaBossiere said.
“Tree and branch removals from the right of ways. Town trees that came down. So we’re doing a lot of cleanup today,” he said.
On residential streets, the storm left a trail of its own. A utility line drooped low over wet pavement beside a leaning pole, a heap of limbs at its base near a mailbox marked 35. Fresh-cut branches covered a lawn in front of a cream-colored house with green shutters, the heavier sections rolled up against a stone wall.
Beside another house, an oak lay torn out by its roots, the root ball tipped on end and the trunk already sawed into thick rounds, with yellow caution tape strung between the trees still standing and sawdust scattered at the edge of the driveway.
“Some trees and tree branches down,” LaBossiere said. “Nothing too big.”
Not every fallen tree is the town’s to clear. Winchester’s public shade tree bylaw reaches private property only when a tree threatens a public way or town property; in those cases the tree warden, a role LaBossiere also holds, notifies the owner and may remove the tree at the owner’s expense.
The weather service issued a flood watch on Sept. 28 for all of eastern Massachusetts through 2 a.m. Tuesday, warning of flooding on poorly drained streets and minor river flooding, with another inch to 1.5 inches of rain expected.
On Sept. 25, forecasters had held off on a watch because the rain was spread over several days.
Showers are forecast before 3 p.m. Tuesday, with a high near 67, ahead of a warmer, drier stretch later in the week.
LaBossiere’s verdict on the storm Winchester spent Friday bracing for took five words.
“Didn’t really have heavy rain,” he said.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
