Work of mowing crew raises concern in Calais

CALAIS – Hurricane Frances may not make its way up the East Coast, but residents on the Shattuck Road wonder if it didn’t sneak in the back door.

On Friday, residents walked outside their manicured homes to find the rights of way on either side of the road mowed down and trees skinned, their bark peeled back. Debris was everywhere.

For a time, it looked as though the right of way was ground zero for the hurricane.

But instead of hurricane winds, it was the city’s public works crew that was being blamed for the destruction.

The city had rented a flail mower to cut grass, weeds and three-quarter-inch-diameter brush.

So time was of the essence, City Manager Linda Pagels said Monday, to get the job done.

The crew started the Friday before the last major three-day weekend of summer. They wanted to finish cutting vegetation and trees not only on the Shattuck Road, but also on the Carson and Hardscrabble roads.

The Shattuck Road leads to a charming campground that sits next to Keene’s Lake. Dana Osborne, owner of Keenes Lake Family Campground, was unimpressed.

“They did this on the Friday, before the Labor Day weekend,” he said. “It does not leave a good impression on people when they see something like that.”

He said he saw the mower on Friday.

“It’s a mower that’s on an arm on a tractor. It is used as a mower for grass, but they also use it to shred the trees,” he said. “And as you can plainly see they did shred trees.”

First-time visitors, Osborne said, noticed the mess. They asked, “Do they leave it like this? There’s a lot of branches on those trees that are absolutely just shredded and hanging there.”

Clayton Ranney, who also lives on the Shattuck Road, said he watched the city crew. “I thought it was pretty neat,” he said. “I saw this done in New Zealand.”

Ranney said the work needed to be done because trees and limbs had encroached on the highway. “This was getting dangerous, it was getting closed in,” he said.

The city manager said the crew would be back to clean up the Shattuck and Carson roads. She said Hardscrabble Road was cleaned up Friday. “They did go through with chain saws and cleaned it up and took away the debris,” she said.

Pagels said the overgrowth had created problems for the city’s snowplows. She said branches that stretched into the road were responsible for breaking the plow windows and injuring the wingman. She said vegetation had grown into the roads and had hindered visibility making it dangerous for pedestrians and children on bikes.

Asked about the impression the Shattuck Road would have on first-time visitors to the area, Pagels said, “I guess I don’t know how to address that. Personally I wouldn’t be concerned by what I saw if I were going to the campground,” she said.