Cleanup Time: No Pickup, but Cyr Recycling Open Free

Hurricane Irene, downgraded to a tropical storm before it hit the Merrimack Valley, spared North Andover much damage. Now the cleanup has begun.

"We certainly dodged a bullet, thank God," Director Bruce Thibodeau said Monday morning. "We did have some streets closed until about 8 p.m. yesterday -- Chestnut, Summer, Stevens, to name a few -- and we've had two crews going around cleaning up everything in the streets."

No DPW Pickup

With limited resources, Thibodeau said that the DPW will not be collecting yard debris. However, residents can drop off their debris at the Cyr Recycle Center on Sharpners Pond Road all week, free of charge.

"What happens is a lot of the residents have been used to, in the spring if they have twigs and small twigs they put it out on the curb and we pick it up," Thibodeau said. "We just don’t have the ppl to go around and do that right now. We don’t have the manpower, and we have to get out and clean the streets up."

Cyr is only open to residents and not commercial businesses. In other words, if you hire a company to clean the debris from your yard, they can't dispose of it free of charge at Cyr.

Residents can drop off their debris all week between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Local 'Stimulus'

An alternative to lugging debris to Cyr is of course hiring someone else to deal with the mess.

Billy Tompkins of said he has been awash in cleanup requests since even before the storm started -- very few big projects, but lots of smaller ones.

"Nothing really, really bad, or any major damage," Tompkins said. "It seems to be a lot of limbs off of trees, things like that. Of the trees that came down, there were a couple of 20-footers."

Right now, Tompkins said he is focusing on yard cleanup and maintenance, and larger tree work will be taken on a day-by-day basis. Tompkins -- who charges customers based on labor and estimated time -- has a team of between six and nine workers focusing on the storm cleanup, both in residential homes and commercial properties. And in the wake of Irene, business is booming.

"Storms like this are great for the economy," Tompkins said. "It's almost like a stimulus."

Power Outages

North Andover lucked out and didn't have any flooding issues. But there are still a few wires down and power outages scattered around town, Thibodeau said.

"It's in isolated areas, and National Grid is working on that," he said. "In fact I just saw them working on Chestnut Street."

Some residents didn't lose power until after the storm, as new power outages were reported after 8 p.m. Sunday.

It's estimated that about 4.5 million homes lost power on the east coast as a result of Hurricane Irene. As of Sunday evening the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency reported that more than 646,000 homes in Massachusetts alone had lost power.