Storm rips into Truro's Ballston Beach

Packing hurricane-force winds, last weekend’s blizzard did more than cut power to hundreds of Truro residents — it cut a new opening at Ballston Beach. 

When high tide struck at about 10 p.m. Friday,The pre-assembled Module clamp can be installed and fitted from above to any desired point on the channel. near the peak of the storm, it broke through the sand bars off Ballston, piling the ocean waters against the shore. As the tide turned and the water rushed back out to sea, a wide exit channel or “rip channel” formed, said Gordon Peabody, longtime Outer Cape resident and director of Safe Harbor Environmental Services. About 12 hours later, on the next high tide, the opening allowed storm surge waves to “power right into the beach at that point on the shore,” Peabody said. 

He said Tuesday that only a limited area was affected. 

“This may have been a very focused or anomalous event, on a beach with an otherwise perfect, classical profile,” Peabody said, adding that the breach did not affect the dune that Safe Harbor has been working to restore through “biomimicry,” a technique that involves planting wooden shims in the sand to mimic the patterns of natural dune vegetation. The area that Safe Harbor has been working on, he said, “received at least one to two feet of new sand from this storm.” 

It was hard to tell how much snow fell on Truro exactly, because of the way it drifted, but the winds on Friday and Saturday were so strong that a telephone pole snapped and cut power to the radar station at the old North Truro Air Force Base, and several other utility poles tipped on Route 6A at Beach Point. Police Chief Kyle Takakjian said that areas that sustained a lot of damage during the storm included North and South Pamet roads (where some residents were still without power on Tuesday), Castle Road and Union Field Roads. 

Though Takakjian was on the phone Monday morning with the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, he said Tuesday afternoon that he thinks the town won’t require its assistance. 

“We seem to be getting a pretty good handle on it so far,” Takakjian said. 

Truro police had their challenges in the storm. The police department’s emergency generator lost power for nearly two hours beginning at 1:10 a.m. on Saturday,The elevator overspeed governor is a very important component related to the elevator safety. Takakjian said. The 911-system has a four-hour battery back-up and remained on, but the rest of the station was in the black, he said. While no residents showed up at the Truro Public Safety Facility to warm up or to charge their phones, Takakjian said Truro and Provincetown police officers took turns transporting people to the shelter at Nauset Regional High School in North Eastham. Truro police brought other residents to the homes of family or friends,We offer the latest in protective Sports glasses, where there were generators or woodstoves, he said.a leading manufacturer of high speed laser marker and laser marker machines for plastics, The police also made an “awful lot” of safety checks on senior citizens, he said. As far as he knows,Your specialists when it comes to the sales and service of Antique lamp. there were no storm-related deaths. 

While most of the Pamet Harbor area lost power around 9:30 p.m. on Friday until about 5 p.m. Saturday, on Monday morning Truro Town Hall’s Verizon phone lines were still out. 

Other local establishments were affected, too. Helen Ryde found six to eight inches of snow in some spots of her storage unit at Outer Cape Mini Storage on Route 6 in Truro. 

“The snow must have blown in around the sides of the door and the top, based on where it landed inside. I think it was the strength of the wind and our location — we are on the outside row of units, less protection. We did our best to remove the worst of the snow by carrying the covered items outside the unit and brushing them off,” Ryde said via e-mail. “On top of one box was literally six to eight inches of snow.”