Power outage maps showed that more than 4,000 National Grid customers and nearly 3,000 New York State Electric and Gas Corporation customers in Essex County lost power on Tuesday. More than 2,400 National Grid customers in Franklin County lost power during the storm, according to the company’s outage map.

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The storm

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Frank Richardson shows off one of the thick rubber gloves linemen use when they’re out restoring power after snowstorms. He was in Saranac Lake on Tuesday with a couple dozen Richardson and Sons bucket trucks doing contract work for National Grid after a snowstorm caused numerous pockets of outages. Richardson said he could grab a live wire with these on and be safe. “These save your life,” Richardson said. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Matthew Clay, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington, Vermont, said the Tuesday storm was bigger, wetter and colder than is typical for this time of year. The Adirondacks got 8 to 15 inches, he said.

“It’s not uncommon to get snow in April, but it’s uncommon to get the amount of snow that we got this late in April,” Clay said. “This is definitely a significant late-season event, just based on the amount of snow that we received.”

According to Burlington statistics, Clay said this is the fourth-latest instance of getting 4 inches or more of the fluffy stuff in the past 30 years of recordkeeping — the latest is only April 23.

He said this was because of a perfect storm of meteorological factors — low pressure systems moving around the East Coast pushing storm fronts north, colder air loft, which makes for better precipitation, and a sudden drop in temperatures from 50s on Monday to freezing in the evening.

There was a similar late-season snow event on the evening of April 20 last year, as noted by Tupper Lake resident Stu Nichols, who shared two photos — one from Tuesday and one from April 21, 2021 — which looked almost identical.

Downed trees tangled with power lines lie on Market Street in Keene Valley on Tuesday morning. (Provided photo — Naj Wikoff)

Clay said he remembers that storm. It was a memorable night for him. He and his wife were going to the hospital for the birth of their first son.

“We weren’t planning initially to be staying there,” Clay said. “I remember going home and having to grab everything really quick.”

Clay said this time, because the snow was very wet and very heavy, it caused widespread infrastructure damage. Electric crews were also busy in Vermont on Tuesday, he said.

“It did quite a number on our infrastructure today,” Clay said.

On Tuesday afternoon, Clay said there would likely be no more snow accumulation during this storm.

Downed trees tangled with power lines lie on Market Street in Keene Valley on Tuesday morning. (Enterprise photo — Naj Wikoff)

“The good news is we’ve got a lot of warm temperatures in the forecast,” he said.

He said temperatures should reach back into the 50s this week but the snow probably won’t completely melt off until Thursday.

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Franklin County

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Dozens of Richardson and Sons bucket trucks were in Saranac Lake on Tuesday, doing contract work for National Grid after a snowstorm caused numerous pockets of outages. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Volunteer fire departments across Franklin County were busy responding to calls throughout the storm.

The Saranac Lake Volunteer Fire Department responded to 27 snowstorm-related calls from 8:53 p.m. on Monday night to 4:05 p.m. on Tuesday. Most of those calls happened between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Tuesday, according to the department. Firefighters mostly responded to trees and wires down on the streets and trees down on power lines. When the downed trees didn’t involve power lines, firefighters cleared the roads and trimmed fallen branches. When trees fell on power lines, firefighters said they stood by for National Grid and controlled traffic. One call involved a tree downed on a house, though firefighters said the house wasn’t seriously damaged. The number of volunteers who responded to each call ranged from five to fifteen firefighters.

The Paul Smiths-Gabriels Volunteer Fire Department received its first snowstorm-related call just before 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, according to the department. Firefighters cleared trees from White Pine Road, county Route 60, county Route 55, Jones Pond Road, state Route 86 and State Route 30. The department had 22 members working in the community on different calls and standing by at the firehouse throughout the day.

The Tupper Lake Volunteer responded to 15 snowstorm-related calls from 4:30 a.m. Tuesday to 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, according to the department’s social media page. The calls involved trees and powerlines on the ground or low-hanging wires. The department also responded to one alarm activation.

Tupper Lake village electric crews were called out at 4 a.m. on Tuesday, and at 4 p.m., they were still hard at work out in the woods, climbing poles and restoring power.

Justin Monthie brushes snow off boats at Fogarty’s Lake Flower Marina after a storm on Tuesday. “Not a bad way to start the day off,” he said. “Gets the blood flowing.” His blood was already flowing from brushing off his car to get to work. When he got there, he realized his snow-removal duties weren’t over. Monthie usually builds a “tent” over boats — a peaked tarp to slide snow off to the sides — but these boats just arrived from the factory and he needed to keep the heavy slush off of them. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Department Superintendent Mike Dominie said when the first call came in during the middle of the night, everyone was high energy and ready to get out there. Twelve hours later, they were tired but still at work.

The department has a circuit to get power to National Grid customers near Paradise Point.

Dominie said he had six linemen out there, including himself. That’s everyone available who wasn’t in training or out of town.

In Saranac Lake, there were a couple dozen Richardson and Sons bucket trucks at a strip mall parking lot on Lake Flower Avenue around noon, waiting for directions from National Grid as to where they were going next.

Frank Richardson, the father of the eponymous sons and a “field guy” with the company, said National Grid contracts with Richardson and Sons for storms like these.

He used to work for National Grid and said the company does a good job of making sure they’re ready to restore power in events like this.

Richardson said some members came from as far as Pennsylvania and Ohio to work on the storm. The company is headquartered in Geneva, New York, but does contract work around the East Coast. When the call from National Grid came in on Monday morning to get to the North Country, they scrambled to get up.

They spent the night in Ogdensburg and started working early in the morning. Richardson said moving that many people can cause “mass confusion.” But it’s also exciting.

“When I was younger, it was a lot more exciting,” Richardson said. “I’ve been to thousands of them now.”

Richardson said it’s not just lines and poles getting knocked down that can shut off power. Often, its tree limbs getting heavy with snow and leaning on wires. This trips them off. Then, when the snow falls off and the branches raise back up, it trips the lines off again.

This is mostly what they were handling on Tuesday, Richardson said — nothing major and no widespread outages.

He also said storms in the spring are less severe because there’s no leaves on the trees and storms over the winter blew down most of the loose branches.

“They rarely shut the lines off,” Richardson said. “We usually work them hot.”

They have to coordinate with National Grid to mark with lines they’re working on and get them grounded for safety. Richardson pulled out one of the big, thick rubber gloves they wear. He said they could grab a live wire with them on and be safe.

“These save your life,” Richardson said.

Monday was National Lineman Appreciation Day, a time to celebrate the people who work on the electric grid.

More than 550 customers in the town of Franklin — around 60% of the town’s customers — lost power during the storm, according to National Grid outage maps. Around 350 customers in Harrietstown experienced outages, and more than 400 customers in Malone were left in the dark. National Grid reported 32 outages in the village of Saranac Lake. The company didn’t report any power outages in Tupper Lake.

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Essex County

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State and local highway, electrical, water and parks departments in Keene, Jay, Wilmington and Lake Placid got to work before dawn on Tuesday plowing snow, hauling trees off the roads and repairing power lines. The break of day revealed large trees downed in the streets, some of them taking power lines and poles down with them.

The Wilmington Notch closed for a few hours on Tuesday morning because of downed power lines by Whiteface Mountain, according to Wilmington town Supervisor Roy Holzer. The Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department responded to a call from the town to close the road; the department responded to one other storm-related call on Tuesday.

Holzer guessed that most of the town’s residents who were left without power — which totaled just over 200, or around 22% of the town’s NYSEG customers — probably lived around the Whiteface loop.

National Grid reported a near-blanket outage in the hamlet of Black Brook, with 889 of 898 customers left without power. As of Tuesday afternoon, the company provided an estimated restoration time of 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. NYSEG reported that around 321 customers in Jay and AuSable Forks lost power, though the company didn’t provide an estimated restoration time. Both National Grid and NYSEG serve the three hamlets in Jay.

Town of Jay Deputy Supervisor Tom McDonald said on Tuesday afternoon that NYSEG hadn’t given the town a time frame for when customers could expect power to return. He said the town is in touch with a NYSEG employee who said the company was prioritizing finding downed power lines and making sure everything was safe before putting power back in homes. McDonald hoped to have an estimate later that day.

The community center in AuSable Forks was open as a warming center for people without heat, though McDonald didn’t think anyone had to use it yet.

Keene town Supervisor Joe Pete Wilson, Jr. said there were power, phone and internet outages all over Keene and Keene Valley. He said it wasn’t a blanket outage, but downed trees across the hamlets caused significant damage to the town’s electrical circuits.

NYSEG reported that more than half of its customers in the Keene — 694 of 1,233 customers — lost power on Tuesday.

“All over town there are trees across roads, trees across power lines, trees on people’s houses,” Wilson said. “It’s hard, I don’t even really have a full scope of what’s going on because there’s so much, and it really is across the whole town.”

Wilson said the power was going off and on so much in the town hall that he powered down his computer for the morning — he thought the power had gone off and come back on there around six different times between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.

NYSEG, which provides power to Keene’s two hamlets, hadn’t given an estimate for when power would return there by Tuesday afternoon. Wilson planned to go talk with some NYSEG crews who were working on the ground in Keene to try to get a sense of how long outages might last. He said more southern areas in New York served by NYSEG, like Binghamton and Rochester, were hit harder by the storm, and he thought NYSEG crews might be spread thin across the state.

None of these Essex County towns declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, though it was being considered by the town of Jay. Wilson said that if winds picked up or temperatures dropped, the town of Keene might have to consider declaring a state of emergency. But by Tuesday afternoon, snow was sliding off tree branches around Essex County as temperatures climbed into the 40s.

The village of Lake Placid and the town of North Elba didn’t experience significant outages Tuesday, according to National Grid’s outage map, though town Supervisor Derek Doty said the Wilmington Notch closure kept some town and village employees from making it to work. National Grid reported that 16 customers in North Elba experienced a power outage.

Lake Placid village Electrical Department Superintendent Kimball Daby said those 16 customers reported by National Grid were likely located in Ray Brook. He said Lake Placid Municipal Electric customers experienced similarly sporadic outages throughout the day, with an average of around 10 outages at a time. The department would restore power to some homes, he said, and others would lose power. All Lake Placid Municipal Electric customers had their power restored by 5:22 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Daby.

All of the town supervisors gave credit to their highway, parks, electrical and water departments for springing into action before daybreak Tuesday morning. While the spring storm was unexpected, supervisors said it’s not uncommon for the area.

“It’s the Adirondacks,” Wilson said, “so on April 19, a blizzard isn’t out of the question.”

McDonald called the wet snow “the poor man’s fertilizer” — he said snow like this greens up the grass and puts moisture in the ground for spring crops.

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