Gusts, rains topple trees, tents, power lines

Gusts, rains topple trees, tents, power lines
By Jessica Willis, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Article Last Updated: 07/19/2008 03:01:51 AM EDT


Click photo to enlargeVolunteers work to fix damage to about 30 tents set up for the Pittsfield Art Show, which...«1»Sunday, July 20
PITTSFIELD — A brief but intense thunderstorm tore through Central and Northern Berkshire last night, downing trees and power lines with wind gusts up to 70 miles an hour.
About 1,420 Western Massachusetts Electric Co. customers in the county were without power after the storm, according to WMECO spokesman Frank Poirot.

Power was expected to be returned to 99 percent of WMECO's Berkshire customers by noon today, Poirot said.

Starting at about 6:30 p.m., police and fire crews responded a barrage of calls about trees and wires down on West Street, Tor Court, Lenox Avenue, Williams Street, Division Road, Crane Avenue, Brown Street, Hancock Road, Bradford Street, Partridge Avenue and Pomeroy Avenue, to name a few.

Auxilliary officers, along with plainclothes officers, detectives, and supervisors went out on the scene to help with the backlog of calls, according to Sgt. Mark Trapani of the Pittsfield Police Department.

Downed trees were also reported on Balance Rock Road and Bailey Road in Lanesborough, and on Windsor Road and Route 8 in Cheshire.

The sudden storm also damaged about 30 tents set up for the Pittsfield Art Show, which opens at 10 a.m. today at Palace Park on North Street.

Despite the 40-pound sandbags that were used to hold the tents in place, the high winds easily knocked over the tents and left them in a twisted pile.

After the rain dissipated and the sun


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cracked through the clouds, event co-chair Carolyn Koch surveyed the wreckage and kept a light mood.
"We had just finished setting up and went inside (the Lichtenstein Art Center) for pizza," Koch sighed. "Everything was too easy. We should have been suspicious at that point."

The important thing was that no one got hurt, she said, and no artwork had been damaged by the storm.

"We're just going to have to start from scratch," Koch said.

According to Megan Whilden, Pittsfield's director of cultural development, the organizers would rent, borrow, and buy new tents and open in time today. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today and tomorrow.

The thunderstorm was caused by two separate systems: A storm that formed over New York's Mohawk Valley, and another storm that formed to the east, over Columbia County, according to Brian Montgomery, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Albany, N.Y.

Those two systems merged in Berkshire County, Montgomery said, and the newly-formed storm produced some "very impressive" straight line wind gusts reaching 60 miles per hour in Pittsfield and 70 miles per hour in North County's higher elevations.

Montgomery said there was no evidence of tornadic activity in the storm.

To reach Jessica Willis: jwillis@berkshireeagle.com, (413) 528-3660.

July 24 drill will test emergency response

City
Article Last Updated: 07/17/2008 10:19:07 AM EDT


Thursday, July 17
PITTSFIELD — The three hospitals in Berkshire County, in collaboration with several emergency service providers at the local and state level, will hold an emergency operations drill later this month in Pittsfield.
The drill will be conducted Thursday, July 24, at Reid Middle School in Pittsfield. It is designed to test the response to a major event that results in numerous injuries, requiring a large-scale response and the resources of several emergency-service providers in the region.

Participants in the drill include Berkshire Medical Center, Fairview Hospital, North Adams Regional Hospital, the Pittsfield Fire and Police departments, the Berkshire County Sheriff's Department, Massachusetts State Police, local ambulance services, the Berkshire County boards of health, Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and other emergency service organizations. The drill will take place during the daylight hours.

The drill will simulate an incident causing dozens of injuries, resulting in a mass response and numerous mock-injured being transported to or reporting on their own to the three hospitals. This will not impact the normal operations of the hospitals or fire or police departments, but visitors to the hospitals and hospital patients may see an increase in activity.

The drill is an important tool for the hospitals and other emergency responders to assess the response to an actual incident, should it



occur, and helps these various agencies to better serve the community.

Richmond Fire Dept's annual Chicken BBQ (Fundraiser)

Richmond Fire Dept's annual Chicken
BBQ (Fundraiser) would be held on: Thursday August 14,2008 from 6
pm-7 pm. Tickets are $10.00 a piece.

Tickets can be purchased from Me or any other Member of Richmond Fire Dept.
Anyone interested in purchasing tickets can reach Frank M Speth III at:
(413) 446-3627 or contact the RFD Station @: (413) 698-3366.

Happy 4th Of July

From The Berkshire County Fire Network!

Village Ambulance gets laptops

By Jennifer Huberdeau, North Adams Transcript
Article Launched: 07/03/2008 10:48:54 AM EDT



Thursday, July 3
WILLIAMSTOWN -- Emergen-cy medical technicians have a new tool to aid them at the scene of an accident or during a routine medical call -- laptop computers are replacing the pink carbon-copy patient care records that once had to be filled out.
Village Ambulance Service in Williamstown took its new wireless Panasonic Toughbook laptops online June 16, allowing EMTs and paramedics the ability to fill out electronic patient care records on the lap-size computers and transmit the records to both the ambulance headquarters on Water Street and the fax machines of emergency departments at local hospitals in a matter of minutes.

"Each of our three ambulances are equipped with a wireless router which allows the laptops to connect to the Internet while still on the road," Cara Miller, office manager for Village Ambulance, said Wednesday. "We're connecting through Verizon and haven't had any problems yet."

She said the laptops, which are equipped with a touch screen, stylus writing instrument and keyboard, have fully eliminated the company's need for the carbon copy patient care forms, which were supplied to the local hospitals, the service, it's billing company and the doctor overseeing quality assurance.

"Now, with the push of a button, it's sent in a PDF (portable document format) file to office, billing and quality assurance through e-mail and sent as a fax to the hospitals," Miller said. "North Adams Regional



will eventually have a system that we can integrate with to send the PDF to them as well. The transmission is almost instantaneous."
Shawn Godfrey, operations manager, said the laptops would have a learning curve for staff members, but the were sure to improve overall patient care.

"The screens all have prompts on them, which make sure you've completed a certain part of the report before moving on," he said. "In the long run, it's going to make a vast improvement."

Tom Bleezarde, president of the service's board of directors, said the laptops are already eliminating a "lot of extra key stroking."

"A lot of forms were filled in by hand, then someone had to type those forms in here, at the billing office, at the hospital," he said.

The system cost a little over $20,000, Bleezarde said, which was paid for through annual fundraising efforts and two donations that were not earmarked for specific items.

While Village was the first to implement the system in the county, it isn't the only one to make use of the new technology. The North Adams Ambulance Service took its system "live" on Tuesday, making it the second service in the county to have the laptop technology.

"We have the same system in our three ambulances and our supervisor's vehicle," John Meaney, director of the ambulance service, said Wednesday. "We knew this technology was going to be needed, so we included it in our annual fundraiser that kicked off last October."

He said the laptops are going to be need for a statewide reporting system that will require all ambulance services to electronically submit certain information from their patient care records to the commonwealth.

"They'll be using the information to compile statistics -- for trending purposes -- for example, to see if a certain area has had a lot of difficulty breathing calls," Meaney said. "The data might indicate there is something with the air quality or maybe that a pandemic is starting."

He said one of the benefits of changing over to the paperless system is the elimination of paper records being stored on-site.

"We'll be able to burn the reports to disc for our record keeping, which will eliminate the 12 to 13 boxes per year that we are required to store for seven years," Meaney said.

Daniel LaPlante, manager of the Adams Ambulance Service, said the company wouldn't be far behind with the installation of its own system.

"Our goal is to have our two ambulances up by September," he said. "We are using money we have set aside and money from our fundraiser to put the system in place. It's something the state is looking to require by November, I believe, but in the long run it will be well worth the investment."