Tornado Track near Sturbridge MA June 1, 2011

[meteorologist]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=50854

http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/50000/50854/masstornado_tm5_2011156_lrg.jpg

[meteorologist]

http://www.mass.gov/Ador/docs/dls/city_town/2011/monson.jpg

http://www.mass.gov/Ador/docs/dls/city_town/2011/sptornado.jpg

http://www.mass.gov/Ador/docs/dls/city_town/2011/Path.JPG

from:

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=dorterminal&L=4&L0=Home&L1=Local+Officials&L2=DLS+Newsroom&L3=City+%26+Town&sid=Ador&b=terminalcontent&f=dls_city_town_2011_tornado&csid=Ador

Tornado Taxes Assessors – Local Officials Rise to Challenge

Written by Sandra Bruso

Photos by Kirsten Shirer and Allan Taylor - click here to view photos

"It is a fine, late spring day in Western Massachusetts. In South Monson, a farmer is making his first cutting of sweet smelling hay, a cow casts a baleful eye at me before returning to her grazing, and bees drone lazily by. It is difficult to comprehend that less than half a mile away, the scene is stark, unsettling, and so very different.

As I turn the corner and head north, the sounds of the tractors and the bees are drowned out by the incessant buzzing of chain saws, and the air smells like an uncomfortable mix between pine air freshener and a lumber mill. There is devastation as far as the eye can see.

Two weeks ago, the weather was less idyllic. The high humidity promised to turn stormy, and there were severe weather related warnings. From our DOR office on Dwight Street in Springfield, Kirsten Shirer (Deputy Director of Information Technology) and I could see the storm building to our west, the light an odd yellow. We watched the clouds drop, and then a section began to rotate and drop further. Before long, it began picking up debris, and a few hundred yards from our window, a tornado was born.

We are New Englanders, and as such we didn’t think the storm was going to amount to much. Tornados in the northeast are usually limited to very small areas and the damage tends to be minimal. The storm seemed more like a novelty than a menace. We had no idea of the damage this storm was causing, or the challenges it was going to present to the cities and towns in its path.

By the time we saw the funnel cloud form over the Connecticut River, the main storm had already touched down in Westfield. It would leave a swath of destruction over forty miles long before blowing itself out over Southbridge. Visible from satellite photos, it looks like a dirt road running roughly parallel to the Massachusetts Turnpike. In the wake of the storm damage would range from a few shingles blown off buildings to piles of rubble that were almost impossible to identify as having been homes and businesses only moments before.

In Westfield, the storm crested the hill above Hundred Acres, snapping trees and knocking down fences as it headed down through the Munger Hill neighborhood. The damage was comparatively minor, in retrospect, with one house destroyed and another substantially damaged, but with the majority of affected properties missing shingles, siding, gutters and fences. The Munger Hill Elementary School took the most damage, where the cost of repairing or replacing the roof could cost the city up to $1,000,000. The tornado skipped around a little, leaving some streets untouched before brushing through the neighborhoods off Pontoosic Street.

Moving eastward, it skimmed though Agawam, toppling trees and knocking out the power, closing streets until the debris could be cleared and the lines restored.

It swept through West Springfield, first through the rail yards off Memorial Avenue, then straight into the Merrick section of the town. This area is a mix of commercial, industrial and multi-family homes which sprouted up around the rail yard at the end of the nineteenth century. By the time the storm had crossed the Connecticut River, two people were dead, five residential buildings and nine commercial buildings destroyed (or condemned) and seventy-four more suffered some level of damage.

Springfield, the City of Homes, was particularly hard hit. The storm crossed the river, destroying a section of the South End neighborhood before climbing the hills and laying waste to the McDuffie School and historic mansions on Maple Street. More modest homes and multi-families on Central Street were destroyed before the storm wrought havoc on the Six Corners and East Forest Park neighborhoods. Gone is a section of Main Street that was once home to a vibrant Italian community. Gone too are many of the multi-family homes in the tight knit Six Corners neighborhood. Also gone are the leafy, tree-lined blocks of tidy postwar houses that made up the family friendly East Forest Park subdivisions. Mapped by GIS, the actual path of the tornado affected just under 2,000 properties, with others within a one mile radius affected to a lesser degree.

From the East Forest Park neighborhood in Springfield, the storm barreled into Wilbraham, where it followed Tinkham Road west across the Town and up Springfield Mountain. After cresting the mountain at Peak Street, it dropped into the heavily wooded valley and into Monson, destroying acres of old woodland before ravaging the picturesque New England village. The town offices and police station were severely damaged, and church steeples were toppled; then the twister began tearing up houses and trees on its way to a camp in Brimfield, where it damaged 95 of 97 trailers at the site, killing one resident.

Before the storm had spent itself, it careened through Sturbridge and into Southbridge, where it damaged a number of small planes at the airport.

For many of us who work in Springfield or Hartford, the commute home became a multi-hour ordeal. It was impossible to travel from north or south between Connecticut and Massachusetts, as all roads were blocked by debris and downed power lines from the Connecticut River all the way to Route 84 in Sturbridge. Emergency personnel were stretched thin by the scope of the damage, and travelers were largely left to their own devices in finding a passable route home through hail, lightning and torrential downpours.

By sunrise on Thursday morning, it was clear that this wasn’t the type of storm we were used to in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the lighter widespread damage we have come to expect from a hurricane. The landscape went from normal to ravaged in the blink of an eye. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which houses stood or which fell. Some were unidentifiable piles of rubble, and you had to wonder what stroke of luck had allowed the residents to escape with their lives. Possessions were literally scattered to the winds. A pay stub belonging to Monson Assessor Russell Bressette, whose house was destroyed, was found halfway across the state. The gentleman who found it called the Assessors’ Office, and this reminder of the storm, literally brought to him on the wind, prompted him to make a donation to the relief efforts. A check register belonging to another resident was found 90 miles away in the Boston suburb of Milton.

The municipalities all rose to the challenge, with assistance from State and Federal Emergency Management Agencies and the Massachusetts National Guard. Police Officers and First Responders worked tirelessly. Neighbors helped neighbors. Strangers spared by the storm reached out to those who were less fortunate and town officials scrambled to do what they could.

Monson faced some unique challenges. The town hall was one of the buildings damaged in the storm. At this point, no decision has been made about whether the building will be razed.

Since the Police Department was in the basement of the town offices, formerly a high school built in 1923, communication between emergency personnel was impossible. Wires were down and electricity was out throughout most of town. Parts of Wilbraham, East Longmeadow and Hampden wouldn’t have power restored until the following Saturday. And yet, Monson managed to coordinate their efforts.

An unsung hero in the storm was town hall custodian Paul DeMaio, who had the presence of mind in the immediate aftermath of the storm to protect the computer servers, protecting them from the weather and getting the generator up and running. He found town officials, and asked if only a few things could be removed from their offices what their priorities would be.

Warning sirens in most towns have given way to newer technology. With reverse 911 available, many communities saw no point in maintaining them. But with no power, and phone lines down, reverse 911 isn’t a possibility. Despite this, by Thursday morning, most of the town employees met on Main Street as everyone took in the destruction of their quaint town center. Town wide meetings for those affected were quickly organized, with notices posted around town and announced on the radio and in the newspapers.

Town government relocated to the middle school building on Thompson Street. Before the building was sealed on Saturday, town officials, with the aid of town residents, including some civically minded high school students packed what they could for the move to Thompson Street.

Saturday afternoon I drove to Monson to make a donation at the First Church. I was struck first not by the devastation which confronted me, but by the heavy line of traffic up Main Street. There were lumber trucks and utility trucks and National Guard vehicles, one with wheels as high as the roof of my minivan. Many of the cars belonged to people who had come to gawk at the damage. Their cars choked the streets and made it difficult for those committed to the recovery efforts. Although I came with the best of intentions, to a town I had worked in for sixteen years and streets I knew well, I felt like an interloper, intruding on a private grief. The town had come together, the strength of the community standing like a beacon above the ruined steeple of the First Church, a hub for relief supplies and volunteers. I wasn’t able to stop at the church with my donation. Probably due to my out of state plates, I was waived on by an earnest looking young Guardsman.

Not all the outsiders had come to gawk however. A couple helped Russell Bressette collect what items they could from the rubble of what had been his home. He didn’t recognize them because they had driven all the way from New Hampshire to help with this heartbreaking task.

Town Administrator Gretchen Neggers had things well in hand. Town government was settling into new, temporary digs by Saturday, although it would be days before the offices knew what they had packed, as there was little time for organization. Boxes were packed, loaded into trailers, and moved to the new location. There would be time enough for sorting once they were unpacked.

The building inspector, Harold Leaming, hit the ground running. Every house affected by the storm was inspected and a placard was posted. Red indicated a building that was demolished, or would need to be because it was structurally unsound. Yellow placards are more ambivalent – the property might be sound after some repairs are made, or after review by the insurance company or a structural engineer might be deemed unsound and need to be demolished. The Greens are my personal favorites. They denote that the building has only cosmetic damage and is suitable for occupancy. Lance Trevallion, the building inspector shared by Wilbraham and Hampden, used the same system.

It’s hard, in the face of so much personal tragedy, to remember that there is an official task at hand. For me, that meant overcoming a personal reluctance to intrude on people and towns reeling from the tragedy they were faced with, and for our assessors, it meant having to quantify the damage in time for quarterly bills, and in many cases, to determine abatements for the last month of the FY 2011 fiscal year.

Ann Murphy, the Assistant Assessor for Monson, was up to the task. The first thing was to interrupt the billing process already in place. Ann does her own field work, but the sheer scope of the reviews, along with the limited time before first quarter bills needed to be committed presented a formidable task. The town’s revaluation vendor, Roy Bishop, volunteered his services to help with inspections, and to help determine how to quantify the damage. Diane Hildreth, Director of Assessing for East Longmeadow and former Assistant Assessor for Monson also volunteered, as did David Burgess, Principal Assessor for the Town of Amherst. They hoped to complete the task by June 27^th, but beat their own expectations and completed the field work on June 16^th.

In Monson, there were 60 buildings coded red, 67 yellow and 116 green, representing approximately 10 percent of the residential properties. The adjusted values will all be entered before the tapes can be sent for billing before June 30. Because many people have been displaced, a public meeting reviewing the process was held last week, and Ann and her team left hang tags at each property they visited, inviting the taxpayers to call the office with their new contact information.

With so many properties affected by the storm, Monson needs to be concerned about both the FY2011 overlay and lost levy capacity for FY2012, which will shift the burden to the properties that were spared from storm damage by an increase in the rate.

Jim Pettengill, Principal Assessor for Westfield completed his review in record time, and bills there will also be timely. The damage to the property with the destroyed home was less than 50 percent of the overall value, so he does not have any FY2011 abatements to consider. The only financial consideration facing the town is the cost of repairing or replacing the roof at the Munger Hill School.

In West Springfield, the billing process was too far along to stop. With only 88 properties affected, all of them in the comparatively small area of Merrick, there will be little affect on the overlay or the FY2012 rate. Principal Assessor Chris Keefe plans to have all the value adjustments reflected in the actual, third quarter bills.

Wilbraham fared somewhat better, although you might question that driving down Tinkham Road, or looking at the remains of Evangeline Road or Echo Hill. Wilbraham had 12 reds, 77 yellows, and 42 greens. Their first quarter bills have already gone out, so that same urgency isn’t there. That said, they have begun the review process and hope to have all the values and abatements issued prior to the actual bill.

While Monson is facing the challenge of rebuilding a town government, Springfield is facing an assessing challenge of epic proportion. Unlike the smaller communities where properties were inspected by the local building department, Springfield had state and federal help in the inspections. Not everyone was on exactly the same page, and the markings were done with spray paint. These markings are reminiscent of the ones the media showed us in post-Katrina New Orleans. Unlike the placards, spray paint can’t be easily removed, or damaged by wind or rain. The complication was that at some point in the process the inspectors ran out of spray paint, leaving the status of some properties unclear at best.

The City of Springfield had just finished the gargantuan process of field inspecting every property in the city this spring. And now that data was no longer relevant for a minimum of 2000 properties. The inspectors are out again, trying to establish the property data and condition as of June 30. The Assessor’s office was provided with a list of condemned properties. As Assessor Pedge Lynch pointed out, however, that list wasn’t definitive. Some buildings were condemned because of interrupted utility connections, which have been fixed and the properties removed from the list, so the list is somewhat fluid. The status of damaged buildings may be dependent on the inspection of an insurance adjuster or a structural engineer, which will add to the list.

The challenge facing Assessors’ Chairman Richie Allen and his team is daunting. How do you value so many damaged houses? The market value established by the sales in the last year are no longer indicative of the current value in the affected neighborhoods. When there are sales in the coming months, the motivation of the sellers is probably not going to be typical. Even the undamaged properties in some of these neighborhoods are going to have altered values. With damaged infrastructure, destroyed, damaged and boarded up houses, and splintered or uprooted trees, the East Forest Park neighborhoods look more like a war zone that the pleasant oasis it so recently represented.

Springfield is an FY2012 certification community, so a method for valuing these distressed properties is going to have to be developed. It will be up the board of assessors, with the assistance of their CLT certification consultant representative Eric Hardy to determine value. Until then, the Board of Assessors has voted to grant a 25 percent decrease to properties within the direct path of the tornado. They will be adjusting this up or down, based on inspections, before the actual, January bill.

The storm clouds have long since blown away. The sun is shining on Springfield. Coming over the hill on Maple Street, there is a spectacular view of the valley that didn’t exist – at least to the casual motorist – before the storm. Crews are removing splintered trees; blue tarps are ubiquitous across the landscape. But it will be a long time before the dust settles for the local officials in the affected communities."

FROM:

City & Town is published by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue's Division of Local Services (DLS) and is designed to address matters of interest to local officials.

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