Each week, City Manager Tom Aspell gets in the holiday spirit by playing a game of one-on-one with former Temple basketball star Dionte Christmas. Aspell loses 15 consecutive games, but his errant shot chart spells out a city memo, so really everybody wins.
Ringing in the holidays
Phone calls galore
The Thanksgiving Eve snow storm kept Concord fire crews busy, Aspell writes. The department answered 112 calls for service between noon on Wednesday and noon on Thursday, more than five times the usual daily call volume and more than the Insider has fielded in the last 112 years combined. Dispatchers at the department’s regional communications center received 623 calls (none saying the refrigerator was running, according to official records) and dispatched 251 incidents between 3 p.m. and midnight on Wednesday. A total of 92 percent of those calls were answered in under 15 seconds. From 3 p.m. on Wednes-day until midnight on Saturday, dispatchers took 1,825 calls and dispatched 727 incidents.
Thanksgiving Day was also busy for crews, who responded to a basement fire in Pembroke and a chimney fire in northeast Concord, successfully containing both fires.
Highway and Utilities crews of the General Services Department used 580 tons of salt to treat the 11 inches of snow we received, which is hopefully more than you used to treat your Thanksgiving turkey. It took crews 25 hours to plow the city streets and 13 hours to plow the downtown sidewalks in time for Thanksgiving, the Christmas tree lighting celebration, and Black Friday shopping. Crews were challenged with heavy, wet snow that caused trees and branches to bend, fall, and block streets, which has kept the Highway and Utilities Division very busy with debris removal.
Harping on it
Go hear some musicness
The Concord Public Library will host its annual Irish harp music program with the New England Irish Harp Orchestra, Regina Delaney and Claudia Altemus performing on Dec. 13 at 2 p.m., Aspell writes. Please join us for a delightful afternoon of lively music, sure to put you in the holiday spirit. And if it doesn’t, we recommend consuming holiday spirits to put you in the holiday spirit.
