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Nearly two months after tornadoes tore through Springfield, Monson, Southbridge and other Hampden and Worcester county communities, local officials still have a good deal of work ahead of them.
In Monson, where the tornado cut through the town center and blew the roof off the town office building, town officials have been operating out of a school building. As of late July, the library remained closed, as did the town’s only grocery store. The senior center briefly reopened, then had to close again for further repairs, according to Town Administrator Gretchen Neggers.
The town’s debris-removal and other clean-up costs are estimated at $5 million to $6 million – close to one-fourth of the town’s entire budget. Neggers said that anticipated reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are likely to cover about 75 percent of the cleanup, possibly leaving well over $1 million in costs for the town to bear.
“After four years of local aid cuts, our staffing is skeletal to start with,” Neggers said, noting that the town’s highway department has only five employees responsible for more than 100 miles of public roads. “And now all of our resources are devoted to tornado recovery.”
Neggers said she had spoken with 17 different state and federal officials, many of them from FEMA, since the tornadoes struck on June 1.
“There are so many different wings of FEMA, it can be difficult to figure out whom to talk to,” she said.
Some of the federal employees, unfamiliar with the structure of local government in Massachusetts, asked to be directed to the county seat or the county sheriff’s office, she said.
Neggers praised the work of her three selectmen, all of whom are in their first term.
“Basically, at this point what they’re getting from residents is complaints,” Neggers said. “But they’re sticking with it.”
In Springfield, where the rebuilding costs are expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars, the city may be reimbursed at a rate well above 75 percent, due to factors such as damage to low-income neighborhoods, according to Tom Walsh, Mayor Domenic Sarno’s communications director.
The city has established a partnership with the Springfield Redevelopment Authority and a nonprofit, Develop Springfield, to help rebuild the city, through which the tornado ripped a 6.2-mile swath. Steps include establishing a rebuilding master plan and, with the help of businesses, neighborhood councils and other residents, creating an implementation strategy.
Debris removal has become a worry for a number of communities, especially as the recent hot, dry weather has spurred concerns of forest fires along the 40 miles of destruction left by the tornadoes.
The neighboring towns of Wales and Holland have offered to assist with the removal of debris in Brimfield, where roughly 10 percent of the town’s 3,600 residents were left homeless, according to Selectman Diane Panaccione.
Two Brimfield residents, with the help of local officials and Rep. Todd Smola of Palmer, are organizing a major clean-up effort, covering Brimfield, Charlton, Monson, Southbridge, Sturbridge, and Wilbraham, over the weekend of July 30 and 31. (For more about the “Recover, Repair, Rebuild” project, visit http://rrrtornado2011.webs.com.)
In Southbridge, where many homes were destroyed, and the municipal airport and a large apartment complex badly damaged, Town Manager Christopher Clark emphasized the importance of emergency management seminars that he had attended.
His advice to other local officials: “You don’t know how valuable this stuff is until you do it. Don’t just slough it off; there will be a day when you need it.”
The tornado also brought out what Clark described as “human nature at its best” – residents, for example, responded to the lengthy loss of electricity by hosting a communal barbecue, featuring meat that was thawing out and in danger of spoiling.
Walsh said Springfield’s text-message alerts and its use of social media such as Twitter – in addition to warnings put out on radio and television on the day of the tornadoes – may have helped to reduce the death toll.
“The thing that kept resonating in people’s minds is that this part of the country is not accustomed to this kind of weather,” he said. “When you look at the totality of the situation, the fact that you did not have many deaths is a testament to how well people reacted to the warnings they received.”
Three deaths in the region were attributed to the tornadoes.