Irene may have passed, but lingering affects of her wrath remain.

The Mattapoisett Board of Selectmen and Mattapoisett Police Chief Mary Lyons agreed on Tuesday that the NSTAR response to Tropical Storm Irene was sorely lacking.

Tropical Storm Irene struck the South Coast region on August 28 after being downgraded from hurricane status.  The storm caused widespread power outages, some of which lasted the entire week, and downed trees across the region.

"All of the [town] departments did a tremendous job," said Lyons before adding that, "The response from NSTAR that day just wasn't there."

Whereas Hurricane Bob caused widespread destruction, Irene caused turmoil, said Lyons. Downed power-lines and tree branches combined with the lack of NSTAR personnel created a situation in which police, firefighters and the highway department were unable to clear downed branches due to a lack of information about which wires were dead and which were live.

"The NSTAR response was very problematic for all of us," said Lyons. "We had a lot of small problems that could have been fixed faster if they had a response."

Town Administrator Mike Gagne attributed NSTAR's response to changes in the company's response policies.  NSTAR crews seen on Monday in Mattapoisett were quickly relocated to Greenfield, which suffered severe flooding. During Hurricane Bob, however, trucks and crews were assigned to each town rather than directed across the entire system NSTAR serves.

"The points of contact I had within NSTAR were being as cooperative and helpful as they could," said Gagne. "But the orders were coming from a higher level."

"Their performance was horrible," said Board of Selectmen Chairman Paul Silva. "And that's putting it nicely."

Power restoration proved difficult for a number of reasons including limited resources and staff from utility companies, lack of coordination with the town and poor or inadequate trimming of branches around power lines.

Lyons was also concerned with the confusing responses from utility companies like NSTAR and Verizon about who is responsible for trimming which branches.

"There's a lot of vegetation up and around power lines," said Gagne.

Often, the town will be told by either company that trimming certain branches or trees is the other company's responsibility.

"There needs to be a better system for tree trimming," said Lyons. "There seems to be a need for some common sense problem solving."

The untrimmed branches and vegetation exacerbated the power outages in many areas by forcing the town to wait for NSTAR crews to arrive.

"The rule is that if a tree gets caught up in the wires then we can't touch it without an NSTAR guy on scene," said Barry Denham, the Mattapoisett Highway Surveyor. Denham said the Highway Department has four employees while the town has 44 miles of road.

"They can remotely isolate the lines from New Bedford," said Selectman Jordan Collyer adding that NSTAR employees he spoke to during Irene commented that the company should have cut all power to Mattapoisett so that the town could have been sure all lines were inactive. With all lines inactive, the town could have begun recovery efforts much sooner. Instead, the town was often forced to put caution tape around downed wires and leave them for later.

"This is the fourth week we've been dealing with the storm," said Denham. "We started a week before the storm."

Denham said the Highway Department is still dealing with the lingering damage caused by the storm.

“For all intents and purposes, it was just a bad tropical storm,” said Gagne. "Is this a wake-up call?"