This week’s snowstorm has paralyzed many areas of Massachusetts with ongoing power outages — but even the task of simply clearing snow from roadways is wreaking havoc in Fall River.
Nearly 60 Massachusetts National Guard members arrived in the city Wednesday morning to support snow recovery and response efforts.
The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, the Fall River Department of Community Maintenance and members of the State Department of Transportation all converged at a local fire headquarters Wednesday to plan the best way to plow scores of side streets in residential neighborhoods that remain buried under 41 inches of snow two days after the storm hit.
Andrew Raposo, a lifelong resident, calls the storm “historic” and says he’s never seen anything like it.
“I’m looking outside at my front lawn and there’s a snow pile, about 15 feet high from the street,” Raposo said. “And unfortunately they’re going to pile it in the medians and pile it on the front of people’s front lawns. That’s kind of what’s happening.”
Raposo wears dual hats. He works as a city councilman, as well as the principal of Espirito Santo Catholic School in Fall River. He lives close to Route 24 and Eastern Avenue, and was able to help shovel out his parents home about three blocks away.
But he knows the difficulty facing the city, the schools and all the residents and understands the pressing need to clear the snow from residential streets.
“I’ve got a lot of messages and a lot of phone calls from residents in different parts of the city, you know, just obviously asking for help.”
Mayor Paul Coogan said Wednesday afternoon that about 40% of the roads in the city still need to be plowed.
“Obviously, it’s snow removal, snow removal snow removal,” he said.
Side streets remain the biggest challenge
He said that most of the main roads “are down the pavement,” although many are “a little narrower because of the amount of snow on each side.”
“It’s a lot of these side residential streets that are tight and it’s tough for the [plows] to get down,” he said. “Fall River’s built on a hill, so we have a challenge there also.”
Al Oliveira, the city’s director of city operations, said crews are working as fast as they can to clear the side roads using heavy equipment.
“We divide the city into sectors and various smaller roads are pretty much the ones that we’ve not been able to get to,” he said.
Coogan said the city set up a storm operations headquarters on Commerce Drive in the industrial park.
National Guard members came in with shovels and blowers to help clear snow away from hydrants. The state Department of Transportation, Coogan said, loaned the city a “ton of equipment,” such as front loaders, dump trucks or skids to use in recovery and snow cleanup.
Like many other towns and cities, Coogan said he’s asking residents to please be patient because this was a once-in-a-lifetime type of storm.
“I want to tell them that we’re in a natural disaster. Florida has hurricanes. The middle of the country’s got tornadoes. And we got blizzards,” he said.
Coogan said he lived through the Blizzard of ‘78, but that the Blizzard of '26 has been worse due to social media. Tempers are flaring, he said, adding that he understands the frustration.
“We had plenty of notice that the storm was coming. We told people what was going to happen. We, two or three days out, were telling them to go shopping now, get stuff together, this could be really bad. I mean, we didn’t know it was gonna be 41 inches.”
The city of Fall River has issued 600 tickets and towed 40 cars. Slowly, he said, the recovery is underway.
“I still see a bunch of streets not touched, but I’m also seeing a lot that weren’t touched a few days ago and are now open,” said Coogan.
Work continues on Plymouth and elsewhere
Some 20 miles to the northeast of Fall River, in Plymouth, thousands remain in the dark. In total, 160,000 customers statewide remain without power. Doug Foley, president of Electric Operations at Eversource for Massachusetts, updated the town and other South Shore communities on the efforts to restore power.
He said 1,000 crews are working hard in the restoration process. He expects most to have power back by Friday at the latest.
“We’re going to continue to restore today and tomorrow. We’re going to bring a lot of those customers and get their power on a lot quicker,” he said.
Gov. Maura Healey said a state of emergency remains in effect for all counties except for Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin. She said that “folks across Southeastern Mass. are still feeling the impacts of this storm and there is a lot more work to be done.”
Healey said the state requested assistance from out-of-state mutual aid to support snow removal operations on municipal roadways.
The Vermont Agency of Transportation sent approximately 30 front-end loaders and dump trucks. New York State has deployed more than 50 pieces of equipment.
MassDOT has over 3,000 pieces of state and vendor equipment working on clearing roads and highways.
Fall River’s Andrew Raposo said his school will remain closed for the rest of the week, as is the case with many school districts.
He underscored some of the good that’s come out of this storm and that includes the jobs of EMS workers, police and fire department members who have helped residents and medical personnel like nurses and doctors get to the hospitals.
He said working together and caring about each other has made all the difference during the storm.
“If there’s any highlight to what’s going on, the kudos to our public safety sectors for their teamwork and getting their job still done under the circumstances.”
