FARMINGTON – Franklin County commissioners commended county Emergency Management Director Tim Hardy Tuesday for his efforts to guide the county through flood stages this weekend.
“I think we hired the right man for the job,” Commissioner Gary McGrane said.
He kept everybody informed about what was going on, and that communication was a key factor in officials’ staying on top of flooding situations, McGrane said.
It was a “bang-up, bang-up job,” McGrane said.
Hardy said assistant emergency Director Olive Toothaker is in the process of collecting preliminary assessments of damages in towns. By Tuesday morning, Hardy said, the damages to towns, with not all reporting yet, had reached $194,156
Hardy planned to ride the county roads Tuesday afternoon to assess the damages.
“I think everything went real well,” Hardy said. “There were no injuries to report.”
Hardy called an emergency meeting Friday to prepare for potential flooding and plan preventive actions, including finding places for animals in need of shelter.
Nine horses from the Gage Farm in New Sharon were moved to the Farmington Fairgrounds Saturday morning, and 30 to 40 dairy cows were moved from the Davis Farm in New Sharon to Commissioner Fred Hardy’s farm in New Sharon, Hardy said.
Emergency dispatchers started fielding flood calls about 3 a.m. Sunday, he said.
Hardy said dispatchers at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department and Jay Police Department had their hands full and did a superb job
They were the “key link,” Hardy sad.
Initially there was an ice jam on the Sandy River in the Strong area, but it moved down to Farmington. There are still two ice jams on the river, he said, one about three-quarters of a mile long near Route 156 and Back Falls Road, and the other about a mile long between Farmington Falls and New Sharon.
The Sandy River crested between midnight to 1 a.m. Monday in Farmington and about 11 a.m. Monday in New Sharon before it started to recede.
Besides the streams and rivers overflowing banks, Hardy had said earlier, roads were washed out from rain and runoff because the ditches couldn’t take the water.
Weather observer Dennis Pike said Tuesday that the total accumulation of rainfall was 3.81 inches in the Farmington area.
Among the hardest hit areas were Weld; New Sharon, where an ice jam at the Kennedy Bridge had overflowed onto Route 27, also known as Mile Hill Road; Route 156 in Washington Plantation, which was down to one lane after the road collapsed in some places; and Stanley Road, off Route 27, which was impassable on the Farmington side, county emergency directors said Monday.
Temple Emergency Management Director George Andrews said Monday that the town received “a fair amount of damage,” which he estimated at tens of thousands of dollars. There are five roads that have been washed out, he said: Varnum Pond, Forest Hill, Oak Hill, Day Mountain and Kenniston. Waltonen Road was under water in some sections, so he couldn’t tell the extent of damage there, Andrews said.
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