Businesses and civic leaders in the North Country spent months preparing for Monday’s total solar eclipse. The morning after totality hit, some said they felt all that hard work paid off.
Colebrook town manager Tim Stevens spent the better part of the past year thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong during this week's eclipse.With some forecasts predicting as many as 50,000 visitors could come flooding into the North Country, Stevens advised local banks to make sure ATMs had extra cash; he urged local diners to order extra hamburger meat; and he advised gas stations to stockpile fuel.
Luckily, the town avoided any crises.
"We in the town of Colebrook had no dispatch calls as far as events that needed to be responded to by first responders,” Stevens said Tuesday morning. “And this is always a very good thing. We had two first aid stations set up: Neither one of them needed to actually work on anyone on a first aid capacity."
Stevens credits all the work town officials and residents did in the proceeding months.
Many local businesses in Coos County say they saw a boom in business from eclipse traffic,
Brooke Kenney, manager of Northern Comfort Motel in
Colebrook, said all of the motel's rooms had been booked for months. But the staff got creative so they could accommodate additional guests.
"We had three families, I believe, that tented in our field as well,” Kenney said. “And then we had one or two people that asked if they could just park their vehicle and sleep in their car in our parking lot. So we allowed that as well because we had porta potties."
The motel ordered 50 T-shirts to commemorate the day, which Kenney said sold out quickly.
April is normally a quiet tourism month for New Hampshire's North Country, so many residents said they were grateful for the opportunity to capitalize on the crowds.
