Documentary marks Ida’s long term impacts in Upper Dublin

Seven-part series features interviews with ‘Chainsaw Gang’ members

FORT WASHINGTON – To mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Ida, Upper Dublin Township resident Frank Flegeal decided to make a documentary.

Township residents decided earlier this year that they wanted to do something in observance of the September 2021 storm that produced historic flooding levels and an EF-2 tornado to the region. It came through with powerful force, downing trees, power lines, damaging properties, and killing four people, including a 68-year-old Upper Dublin woman.

Flegeal, who’s resided in the suburb since 1984, recalled some trees coming down outside his home, but had no major damage. The former high school television production teacher put his skills to use by making a seven-part documentary where interviewed more than a dozen people, taking viewers back to the severe weather event that rocked the community.

“I’m retired. We don’t get out and around a lot, so I really was not aware until later. We were driving around and we saw – up near Temple Amber – all these trees down, and … I don’t think I realized until I started working on this project how bad it was for the people,” Flegeal said in a recent interview with MediaNews Group.

Documentary’s origin story

Flegeal said he’d joined the Upper Dublin Historical Commission about three years ago where he met fellow member Stan Weinstein. Weinstein’s wife, Maxine, was among the four victims killed. During his conversation with Weinstein, Flegeal suggested doing something for the storm’s five year-anniversary. He remembered a group of people showed up to his home with chainsaws to help.

They called themselves the “Chainsaw Gang.” Barbara Mass, a math teacher at Upper Dublin High School, was one of them.

“[It’s] just a little surreal. It just seems like it was like a whole different life,” Mass said in a recent interview with MediaNews Group, as she went over the events in her mind.

‘Like something in a movie’

Mass had started the school year looking forward to returning to in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the day had started off like any other, the storm had blown the roof off the high school and township building across the street. Mass recalled having to teach virtually for some time. Mass added there were some downed trees on her property, but nothing hit her home.

“The next day it was like something in a movie. Everyone was walking around just looking at the path of the tornado, which was crazy,” she said.

“My math department and a few science teachers came to my house with chainsaws and, and we just chopped up all the trees, brought it to the front. My neighbors across the street, they had some similar stuff going on, so we did their yard,” Mass said. “One of the math teachers took a picture of it and put it on just regular Facebook, and someone said, ‘Well, where are we going tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know where, where should we go tomorrow?’”

The group evolved as people showed up for their neighbors. While Mass said she’d never held a chainsaw prior to the 2021 storm, she took on a leadership role in the Chainsaw Gang, putting her love of spreadsheets and organization to good use.

“Our whole garage is filled with chainsaws and I wound up having a system like if you used the same chainsaw three times, it became yours because we wound up having people donate chainsaws,” Mass said, as former students donated money to the cause.

Mass noted the Chainsaw Gang was really active chopping up trees and clearing areas.

“The heavy hitting had to be from September to December, but then it just never really stopped,” Mass said. When asked how many homes they went to, she couldn’t be sure.

“We stopped counting houses after like 300. Like there’s no way we could tell you how many houses,” Mass said, adding “I mean, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars were probably saved out of pocket of these families because they didn’t have to have someone come in and do it.”

The “UD Helping Hands” page has grown over the years, amassing more than 5,200 members on Facebook. People initially posted in the aftermath of the storm to meal trains, bring food to those in need and remove trees.

“When there’s some storms, people wind up helping each other. So it’s still ongoing,” Mass said. “And then we’ve been utilizing that page for other things too. So now that that page is established as something to help, we wind up using it for different things.”

It evolved to solicit donations for philanthropic efforts, seek recommendations for electricians and even plant new trees. Mass stressed the importance of connecting communities and how relationships have been formed.

“I mean the fact that people still get together, the fact that people still use the page to ask a question or to answer a question, the fact that people just see something go down and want to go help their neighbor,” she said, underscoring how “I think that was a crucial piece to it.”

Mass got to know a cast of characters in the Chainsaw Gang as they worked together to help their community. The initiative quickly turned colleagues and strangers into fast friends.

“I knew some people. Like if we had kids in the same grade or this or that, but that Chainsaw Gang, it just became a group,” she said. “Like, there’s Big Tim. I had never met Big Tim before. He’s one of my best friends. I’ve never met Tractor Dave before. He is a very special person in our lives.”

Reflecting on Ida’s five-year anniversary

Mass was among the subjects interviewed by Flegeal, who began working on the project in March. Flegeal was connected with John Squeri, an Upper Dublin High School technology education teacher, who let Flegeal use the school television studio to conduct interviews with members of the Chainsaw Gang.

Flegeal recalled interviewing “Chainsaw Barbie,” also known as Nikki Besada, a Maple Glen Elementary School teacher. Flegeal learned Besada got her nickname because “she’s very comfortable with power tools, and so she took very naturally to running a chainsaw.”

Flegeal sought out a number of good Samaritans, homeowners impacted by the storm, Weinstein, and former Township Manager Paul Leonard to gain multiple perspectives. The documentary also included video sourced by Flegeal. He underscored how powerful the footage was from above.

“I didn’t want it to be just interviews,” he said. “I wanted to be able to see some of what they were talking about, so you know I got photos, but I also looked online and just did a search for Upper Dublin Tornado 2021, and on YouTube I found a lot of videos people did with drones.”

With help from Tom McLoughlin, secretary of the township’s Historical Commission, and fellow member Steven Hunter, they got to work.

“Hi, I’m Leslie DiMartile, resident in Elliger Park. Sept. 1, 2021, it was a beautiful day to start. Around that 6 [p.m.] time, people started sending texts that they were seeing that Fort Washington was on the news having a tornado warning. So the kids and I went down in the basement,” DiMartile said in a video.

With Weinstein, Flegeal said it was less of an interview and more of Weinstein “just talking.”

“He didn’t need anybody to ask him questions. He knew what he wanted to say,” Flegeal recalled of the conversation with Weinstein about the day his wife died when a tree fell on their Fort Washington home during the storm. Photos of Maxine were incorporated in the documentary.

Flegeal remembered Weinstein talking about how Maxine had been upstairs and Stan had been downstairs. Flegeal said that Weinstein had “heard the bang, and he walked upstairs, and the wall was gone. The roof was gone, and all he could see was her leg, and she wasn’t moving.”

A big takeaway from their conversation with Leonard was that storm damage ranged in severity, but was not widespread across the township.

“[Leonard] talks about how you know the people over towards Willow Grove or in Upper Dublin, they had no idea,” he said.

DiMartile, on the other hand, couldn’t get out of her neighborhood. Flegeal emphasized the fact how “she talks about the fact that people had to cut their way into the neighborhood because the streets were completely blocked by all these trees.”

Residents foster community

The events of that day remained with Mass all these years later.

“I think you’ll never look at Stewart Creek the same way because off of 309 you can see it where it used to be trees or over in Maple Glen, that was a whole tree area. Now they’re putting houses there. Stewart Creek was just a mess. Joel Drive … I think they might have started fixing that house just now. There’s just pieces that you look at and you’re just like wow.”

But a community was forged in the aftermath of that tornado as neighbors leaned on each other. Mass recalled an “interesting day” where a divided group came together.

“Politics always play a role in people’s lives, and we were at this one house that people were running for school board, and there’s the one group and the other group, and they were all hauling limbs, and bringing it to the curb, and just working as a team, and it didn’t really matter at that moment,” she said. “They might clash in certain political views or one’s running for something that the other one’s running for, but that day, everyone just worked.”

“[I] hope it never happens again, but it was a bad time for a lot of people, but it was kind of really cool seeing people just come out and do it, and made a really bad thing a great thing,” said Tim Sherman when interviewed by Flegeal.

As Ida’s five-year anniversary passed, thunderstorms rolled through the area in early September.

“It still bothers me when the storms come,” Mass said, adding that “I don’t think, oh, what happens if this happens again because I just don’t want to think about that.”

She’d post on the UD Helping Hands Facebook page and often find others felt the same. “When it’s a storm out, sometimes it’s kind of a really tough feeling in your stomach, and it’s just kind of nice to know you’re not alone feeling that way.”

As Flegeal’s work on the documentary progressed, he worked tirelessly to edit the footage down to 75 minutes of content across seven videos. The finished products were posted to the “Upper Dublin History” Youtube page, with the final installments expected in early October.

“I’m glad to have been able to do this,” Flegeal said.

This article appears courtesy of a content share agreement between Fideri News Network and The Media News Group. To read more stories like this, visit https://www.thereporteronline.com/.