I live in New Fairfield near Candlewood and we got smoked. I happened to go home early because I was fighting a bad head cold, fell asleep on the couch, and woke up to my phone blurting an alert. Put on the weather channel and saw possible tornado coming toward Sherman (next town up). I was supposed to pick up my 6 year old daughter at dance class in town at 5:15. I grabbed my wallet and keys to go get her early and the storm was on top of my house. I heard the freight train noise people talk about. I ran to the basement. The wind part only lasted about a minute I would say. It switched to hail and then to rain and I went back upstairs. My neighborhood was smashed.
On my property, no damage at all other than a neighbors maple dropped some huge limbs around my boat but did not hit it thankfully. I ran to my car to go get my daughter and got to the end of my street and it was blocked by a big downed tree that was also hanging in the wires. The tranformer for our street was in my neighbors front yard and the pole was broken in half hanging down. My next door neighbor has several huge trees down in his yard, several neighbors had trees on their roof. The worst part was not being able to get to my daughter and not knowing how town fared. I couldn't reach the dance school for about an hour and then got through on the owner's cellphone. She said my daughter and two other girls were ok and watching videos on the dance teachers phone and whenever we could get there would be fine. The dance teacher lived in Newtown, she wasn't getting anywhere anyway. Every main road in NF was blocked by trees and downed wires.
It took my wife six hours to get home from Oxford. My neighbor the next street down was able to get out by driving under trees in the wires and got my daughter and brought her home. Just from my house to town you had to drive under or around a dozen trees. I saw today that NF had 419 power poles broken and 121 tranformers. We got our power back last night. For the first two days (Thursday and Friday) we saw no, zero, help from any authorities or power/tree companies. Most of the local roads were being cleared by residents with chainsaws. We cleared most of our neighborhood ourselves. At least the stuff we could take down without killing ourselves. The first linesmen appeared yesterday morning and put us back together. They were from Massachusetts. Good guys. Really an incredible experience. It will be months before all this is cleaned up.
We also had one fatality in town as a tree fell on a woman's car and killed her with her three year old in the car. My discomfort was nothing. The three year old was unharmed by the way. Small blessings.
