 Elizabeth Cherniak of South Great Road surveys the tree across her driveway on the morning after the storm (click any photo to enlarge). |
 The post-Sandy view on Laurel Drive. |
 A tree knocked down across Silver Hill Road by Hurricane Sandy. |
On Oct. 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast. Lincoln got off fairly lightly, though many trees still at the height of their autumn colors were knocked down. More than half of homes in town lost power in the storm, and the muffled roar of generators could be hear in many neighborhoods for days afterward. Of course, this was dwarfed by the damage seen in coastal New York and New Jersey.
Shortly after the storm, Scientific American compiled some meteorological statistics on Sandy, which had:
- the second-lowest barometric pressure (940 millibars) ever recorded at that time for a tropical cyclone in the western hemisphere (it’s now #3 behind Patricia in October 2015 at 879 millibars and Wilma in 2005 at 882 millibars)
- waves of 39.67 feet (recorded at a buoy about 20 miles east of Bermuda)
- 9-foot storm surges in New Haven and The Battery, N.Y.
- 26 inches of snow in Redhouse, Md.
There was plenty of drama for Elizabeth Cherniak of South Great Road, who heard a tree go down across her driveway on the evening of the storm. Ten minutes later, another loud crash came as a tree fell across power lines on the road adjacent to her driveway.
“Then a transformer exploded—it was like a bomb going off,” she said. “Then I noticed little fires up in the wires and the tree trunk was glowing” as the tree began to burn. Fortunately, the heavy rain doused the fire quickly.
Lincoln safety officials postponed Halloween trick-or-treating for the second year in a row because of downed power lines. Sandy came exactly a year after a 2011 nor’easter dumped an unexpected load of wet snow from West Virginia to Canada. The largest snowfall in Massachusetts was 30.6 inches in Plainfield.