ANDOVER — On Saturday afternoon Brendan O’Connell and Mary Andrews sat in lawn chairs outside their 43 Dascomb Road, watching a digger derrick and crew sink an auger into the ground next to a snapped utility pole.
Across the street, a grandmother and grandfather, Adrian and Mary Phaneuf, babysat their four grandchildren and cleaned the yard, the grandparents drafted into service to help their family recover from Friday’s sudden and destructive storm.
Meanwhile, in the backyard, next door at 39 Dascomb, John Anastasiadis looked on as a tree crew with roaring chainsaws worked on the roof, cutting a tree into pieces after it had crashed onto the house.
John’s wife and son, who was playing a video game, were in that room, the family room, when the severe weather struck around 3 p.m. Friday.
The limb punctured the roof and entered the room halfway between the ceiling and floor.
This was one Andover neighborhood of many suddenly turned upside down in the howling tempest of 24 hours earlier.
Saturday afternoon, serenity and a stern reminder of nature’s power alternated along this tight-knit neighborhood on Dascomb Road in the wake of Friday’s storm.
Pockets of green, landscaped yards were followed by downed limbs and wires, broken trees and utility poles.
The odd contrast played out throughout the town where every other street had some sort of physical damage.
In the Dascomb backyard, Anastasiadis was as calm and collected as could be expected, but rued the abysmal cell phone coverage in his part of town.
It was so poor that his wife was unable to get through to 911 after the storm hit.
Fortunately, his family was uninjured when the tree came through the roof and into the house. But had someone been seriously hurt there would have been no way to contact first responders, he said.
His son had gotten out of school early Friday, an early release because of the extreme heat. When the storm hit, Anastasiadis raced home from his workplace on the other side of Andover.
“There was hail and rain and leaves floating in the air,” he said. “I thought it was a tornado.”
His family was scared and shook up but otherwise okay.
In the yard Saturday, foreman Misael Flores and his crew, of Hartney-Greymont and Davey Tree in Danvers, were on their second tree removal job of the day and headed next for Phillips Academy for tree work.
Brendan O’Connell, at 43 Dascomb, a software engineer, said he was getting accustomed to big storms and power outages, given their frequency.
There was no mistaking the storm when it hit.
Marble-sized hail pounded the house, a huge spark of electricity flared across the street where the tree snapped and landed on the power lines.
“It felt like a hurricane for 20 minutes — it was crazy,” he said. “The utility pole was snapped and hanging over the street. The wires hanging. Wires in the street.”