Street Clearing Ongoing in Braintree After Beastly Blizzard

While the main streets and many of the side roads in Braintree were cleared of snow by Monday morning, the town is continuing to target smaller roads and push snow away from intersections to clear sight lines.

"There's a lot of work remaining to be done," Chief of Staff and Operations Peter Morin said Monday morning.

Front loaders and other heavy equipment ranged throughout the town Monday moving snow into giant piles and heaving large amounts into dump trucks to be taken to the landfill for melting.

Plow drivers from the DPW and contractors hired by the town worked from Friday afternoon straight through 11 p.m. Saturday night, Morin said. Officials then brought in heavier equipment to assist with removing snow.

Truck maintenance issues caused by the large volume of snow slowed down the effort somewhat, Mayor Joseph Sullivan said on Sunday.

"When you get a storm of that magnitude you do have equipment failures," Sullivan said. "We pushed through... Friday night and Saturday were some very challenging times."

In addition, three plow contractors working in Braintree moved on to other assignments after Saturday, Morin said. He said that he is unaware of why they left, but that it likely was not financial. Some contractors do private driveways and other work and they may have gone to serve those clients, Morin said.

The blizzard dropped more than two feet of snow on Braintree, lashing the town with high winds Friday night into Saturday. Schools closed Friday and Monday, and Town Hall and Thayer Public Library shut down early Friday.

Much of the region was paralyzed on Saturday and Sunday, with the MBTA halting service altogether Saturday and much of Sunday and Gov. Deval Patrick keeping non-essential vehicles off the roads statewide through Saturday afternoon.

Braintree Town Hall re-opened Monday morning and the town bustled with people heading to work, stopping for coffee and digging out. The plan as of Monday morning is to open schools on Tuesday, Superintendent Dr. Peter Kurzberg said.

Residents found themselves intermittently without power throughout the weekend.

Power began failing in places around 5 p.m. Friday as trees broke apart or were uprooted and damaged BELD's transmission system, Braintree Electric Light Department GM Bill Bottiggi said in an email.

"This happened on a number of our primary circuits," Bottiggi said. "The only way to safely remove the trees was to kill the power to the circuits causing outages."

Crews were pulled back around 11 p.m. Friday night as high winds and snow made conditions too dangerous. They returned to work 8:30 a.m. Saturday.

"We spent the day Saturday restoring power to the vast majority of Town," Bottiggi said. "There were some lingering outages throughout the weekend due to tree limbs on wires and services being pulled off homes, again by tree limbs."

On Sunday, Braintree residents throughout town experienced a resurgence in lost power as NSTAR connections to Braintree's system, damaged by the storm, went down and caused relatively short outages of two hours of less, Bottiggi said.