At 5:30 in the morning in early January, Sarah Heffernan got a call from her dad. He was heading to work and stopped to check on the farm buildings. He's like, 'The greenhouse is gone,'" she said. "All he could see was with his truck lights, so we didn't really know the extent of the damage, but where the greenhouse once was, it was no longer there."
Heffernan lives in Bristol, where she runs a flower farm on her family's property. The night before, there was a big storm. Her neighbors reported wind gusts over 80 miles per hour. The farm lost power in the middle of the night.
"You couldn't sleep anyway because the wind was so horrific," Heffernan said. "We have four kids and they were all up. So, terrible night. I think I fell back asleep about 4 o'clock in the morning for a little while, and I had this dream that something was wrong with the greenhouse."
The greenhouse was a big part of Heffernan's business, Four Blooms Farm. There were actually two greenhouses, and they were big — about 100 feet long by 30 feet wide, with 2-and-half-foot pipes dug into the ground and fortified by wind braces. They gave her a large area to grow flowers year-round. In the morning, all that was left of one was a mangled skeleton of pipes. "It was probably one of the worst days of my life," Heffernan said.
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