Nor'easter floods coastline, brings down trees – even starts a fire

WRENTHAM, Mass. — The nor’easter that moved through New England didn’t just cause problems along the coast, it also brought trees, branches and even flag poles crashing down in many inland communities.

The winds churned up a huge mess in Wrentham, where trees were torn to pieces across town.
"Luckily no one got hurt or anything," Ashley Knott said.

A fallen tree in Wrentham also brought down a power line, which caused an intense fire in one person’s front yard.

A wall of fire sparked out of the grass when the transformer went down with the power line. It left a burned out trench and singed grass in its wake.

Power went out in parts of Wrentham – including at Regional High School, but crews got it back on before the start of the day. For many, it was a night of little sleep.

"[My mother] and my father shot up straight out of their sleep and they were really scared,” Knott said.

Crews worked to clear cracked limbs and fallen trees all day after the wild overnight ride.

Wrentham's Department of Public Works spent the morning clearing blocked roads.

“This one blocked the road,” Wrentham Tree Warden Ray Rose said, gesturing to a tree being chopped up. “The one on West Street was an Ash tree. Thirty feet into person's yard, it was big enough to come into West Street and going into the neighbor's yard as well."

Crews also cleared the upper common where a tree split and half of it broke off. It's the same area where a huge tree came down last year in a tornado.  Rose says the heavy rains didn’t help.

“The soil is very fluid, so when you get a high wind, you have solid ground, you get a bunch of blow downs,” Rose explained.

Trees weren't the only victims of Monday night’s wind.  We found other damage, like a flag pole snapped off and signs dangling.

Cox Media Group