(NECN: Lauren Collins – Portsmouth, New Hampshire) The rain made it hard to see anything from Dave Beadling's house in Portsmouth, N.H. Monday afternoon. The hail made it hard to hear. Just a block away at his kids' place, “I got a call from my son that said trees are down, wires are down. I said ‘call 9-1-1.’”
Two giant linden trees planted by the city about 30 years ago are gone. Around the corner on Stark Street, cars are pinned underneath a snarl of limbs.
A woman who only wanted to be called Connie was cleaning up her yard.
“If we hadn't been here,” she says, “we would have flooded the living room, I'm sure.”
She and her husband spent the storm on their hands and knees as water rushed under their front door.
“We just grabbed towels and just were wringing out the towels and sopping it up. I mean it just was like a wave,” she says.
“I look outside and it's like there's hellacious downpour that I just didn't even hear,” says Michael Bliss whose shed was damaged.
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The down burst that moved through Portsmouth didn't hurt anyone, though one woman was briefly trapped in her Jeep at a Dunkin Donuts drive-thru. And because it's an ill wind that blows nobody good, Bliss decided to look for the bright side of the storm.
“Tree guys from a 90 mile radius are making money hand over fist today. I'm gathering firewood.”
Damage was limited to a narrow area that stretched across the city from its northwest to southeast corners. That's where the last few power crews were tackling the toughest outages before another line of storms threatened to move through.
“Some of these houses the meter sockets are pulled right off the house so we have to reattach those, rewire them, if need be and then put the power back on,” says PSNH working foreman Tim Hickey.
At the height of the storm, about 3,600 customers in the area were without power, but most of them were brought back on line Monday afternoon.
