Provincetown Needs a Little TLC After Brutal Winter Storms

This East End house lost a shutter to one of the brutal
nor'easters that clobbered Provincetown this past winter.

There will be a lot of repairs made to spruce up Provincetown and get it ready for the coming summer. We had a bit of damage over the winter due to a number of storms and some really walloping winds, with broken windows and shutters, downed tree limbs, and shingles blown right off the roofs of a number of buildings during a couple of good sized nor'easters that hit us this year.

The last one, at the end of March, was the worst, with steady winds around 40 miles per hour and gusts of 60 or so for nearly two long days. Even as that storm had moved north, pounding up the coast and along the shoreline of Nova Scotia, we still had relentless winds.

By some strange miracle, we didn't lose power. A few folks in PTown lost their electricity for about 10 minutes or so, but I was totally amazed that my power stayed on through the storm. If it went off at all, it was during the short time I was able to sleep during the howling winds that literally shook the building I live in, built before the Civil War and a bit shaky when a big truck drives by, let alone during a serious storm.

The bitter cold, sometimes in the teens to low twenties for days on end, froze a good number of water pipes, keeping plumbers pretty busy, and if you plowed snow for a living, this was a pretty good winter. It snowed a lot, as much as two or three times a week for several weeks, and for a couple of those weeks there wasn't a bag of rock salt or ice melter to be found anywhere in town.

We thank the DPW for all their hard work keeping things running and roads cleared during a long, difficult winter.