Surviving Irene

Ken Giansanti stood in his driveway with his hands on his hips, shaking his head as he surveyed the damage left in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene.
Many of his neighbors lost power and were busy cleaning up loose branches Monday, but Giansanti had bigger problems. Namely, the tree that toppled onto his historic Morgan Avenue home, cracking the walls on the interior of the house.
“It was about 10 a.m., before the storm even got started,” Giansanti recalled of the moment when the tree, with its trunk near the street at the base of the property line, split and crashed into his house, damaging the first and second floors. “It made a lot of noise.”
When the tree came down, Giansanti was in the kitchen with a clear view of the action. His elderly mother was in an upstairs bathroom, nearby where the tree’s upper branches struck the second floor. She has already left the property to stay with Giansanti’s sister, but he was sticking around Monday to find out whether the house was structurally sound. By the early afternoon, his patience was wearing.
“I realize they’re busy, but I’m hoping someone gets here soon,” he said. “The fire chief came and said he was going to send somebody over.”
Preparing for Irene, he was more concerned with the backyard pool and the outdoor furniture that could have blown away. He cleaned up the yard and put the furniture away but didn’t think he could be facing such extreme damage from a tropical storm.
Giansanti is no stranger to severe weather. He has lived in his Johnston home, built in 1720, since 1974 and has weathered plenty of storms.
“There are so many trees here. I’ve had two other trees fall, but they didn’t hit the house,” he said.
Surveying the damage across town, Mayor Joseph Polisena agreed that it could take some time to get things looking like new.
“It’s a mess. We had a lot of tree damage,” he said. “It’s going to take us a while to clean it all up.”
Still, Polisena was relieved that the town fared as well as it did. Department heads joined a conference call Friday with Governor Lincoln Chafee and the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency. Saturday, Johnston officials met to finalize their plans. Equipment was checked to make sure it was up and running, and town vehicles gassed up. One thousand sandbags were distributed to residents. Ferri Middle School and the Johnston Senior Center were on standby as potential shelters. Generators for town buildings were checked, and staff was lined up to ensure there was enough manpower once the storm made land in the Ocean State.
Additional staff was on hand at the police station to manage the anticipated influx of calls from residents facing power loss and property damage, not to mention downed trees and power lines on town roads.
“We put one additional officer on for every shift starting Sunday morning through Monday morning, to help with the increase of call volumes we anticipated on receiving,” said Deputy Police Chief David DeCesare.
At noon Sunday, the emergency response team met again to evaluate the situation. By the time crews from the Department of Public Works arrived at work at 6 p.m., they knew what to do.
“I think, overall, our crew did a fantastic job,” Polisena said. “Our DPW did a fantastic job; our police department did an exemplary job.”
DPW crews have been working overtime since Irene’s winds subsided, cleaning drains and clearing away brush. Homeowners are advised to put storm-related debris on the curb for pick-up.
“The DPW crew did not stop; they were right there. The DPW is an integral part of any type of weather emergency,” Polisena said.
In particular, though, he credited DeCesare with ensuring storm preparation and cleanup run smoothly. DeCesare is the town’s director of emergency management. While he dealt with several snowstorms this winter, Irene posed the first major challenge for him in that capacity.
“We haven’t had a storm of this severity in like 20 years. It’ll be months before we’re fully recovered from this,” DeCesare said, adding that, despite the challenges Irene posed, he was pleased with how organized town operations remained. “I can’t say enough about the work that every single department did in this situation. The teamwork, the collaboration between departments…we’re very fortunate in Johnston to have the department heads that we have.”
Polisena called DeCesare the “shining star” from the storm and gave additional praise to Governor Chafee.
“I was extremely impressed with Governor Chafee. I think what helps with the cities and towns is he was a mayor; he knows what it’s like for us,” he said. “If I had to give him a grade, I’d give him an A-plus.”
During the height of Irene, thousands of Johnston residents were without power, including the DPW office and Johnston Police Department, which had to run on a generator but could only sustain some of the building operations. Phone service cut out, and calls were diverted through the Town of Scituate’s 911 operations. The department was without power for about 12 hours but was back online around 9 p.m.
Moving forward, DeCesare hopes to upgrade the police department’s generators to improve their ability to operate in an emergency. Likewise, the mayor wants to implement a phone tree system to inform town employees whether or not they should report for work in a storm.
After the generator blew at Cherry Hill Manor, Polisena also wants to request emergency management plans from all of the town’s assisted living and nursing homes.
The focus now, however, is cleanup. Thankfully, rain forecasts did not come to fruition, so flooding was not a major issue, but the winds brought many trees and branches down. Polisena hopes to send street sweepers out in the middle of the night through this week.
As of yesterday afternoon, Harding Avenue, Hilltop Drive and Reservoir Avenue were still closed due to debris.
“There’s so much debris that needs to be removed that every department in this town is helping out and doing the best they can,” said DeCesare, who planned to tour the town yesterday with FEMA representatives.
According to Richard Gifford, FEMA spokesman, the agency has five teams assigned to the state to evaluate damages and emergency costs of the storm as applied to public facilities. He said teams would be looking at building and road damages as well as coming to grips with those expenses the city faced in dealing with the storm, such as sandbags, pumps and emergency response teams. Once those costs have been compiled statewide, Gifford said, it is then up to the governor to issue a declaration of request for FEMA funding. He said reimbursement depends on whether costs exceed state and local resources.
“We’ll be here as long as necessary,” Gifford said. He is hopeful the assessment will be completed in a couple of days.
As for students, the start of school has been delayed until Tuesday, Sept. 6. Superintendent Dr. Bernard Di Lullo toured the town Wednesday morning with other school officials to make a determination of when to open. Although Brown Avenue School had disruption in phone service, all of the district’s school buildings had power yesterday and no significant damage had been reported.
The concern, Di Lullo said, was travel.
“We saw some areas that still have significant damage – downed tree limbs, some wires hanging…and because the majority of our students do take buses to school, we wanted to make sure they were safe,” he said.

Editor's note: It was previously reported online and in this week's print edition that school would start on Friday. As of press time Wednesday, that was the determination of Superintendent Di Lullo. On Thursday, the district decided to further delay the opening until Tuesday, Sept. 6.