Lights, heat, Internet slowly restored to towns

As The Lakeville Journal went to press on Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 8, power had still not been fully restored to all customers in all Northwest Corner towns.Connecticut Light and Power representatives continued to work around the clock but, as weary spokesperson Janine Saunders said Tuesday morning, “the complexity of the repairs exceeded what we originally projected.”CL&P President and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Butler had vowed to have all power restored by Sunday, Nov. 6, at midnight. That night, at 11:30 p.m., he sent out a press release to the media saying, “We have not met our expectations and the expectations we set for you. We have missed our goal. For that, I apologize.”As of Tuesday morning, the estimated restoration chart online at www.cl-p.com showed that all six Northwest Corner towns still had some customers without power. Most were expected to have 100 percent of homes and businesses back online by Tuesday, Nov. 8, at midnight; for Kent, however, power was not expected to be fully restored until Wednesday at midnight.It’s impossible to get a completely accurate estimate of how many customers lost power, Saunders said, but CL&P estimates that at the peak, there were 831,000 customers (out of a total of 1,238,067 statewide) who were affected.Saunders urged all customers still without power to call CL&P, daily if necessary, to report. “We can assess what’s happening on a circuitwide basis but we don’t necessarily know on a house-by-house basis what’s happening,” she explained. “People need to call us, every day, to say they don’t have power, especially if the buildings around them all have power back.”The number to call is 800-286-2000.She also urged anyone who has lost power to be sure that all appliances and anything that generates heat or flame be shut off.“If someone was cooking when the power went out, for example, it’s very important to be sure that the stove and oven have been shut off. Sometimes people forget, and things get put on the stove.”Once power is fully restored, Saunders said, there will be some “conversations” about how to avoid similarly lengthy outages in the future. Certainly this October storm caused more devastation, particularly to trees, which fell on power lines.“We had an extremely wet summer,” Saunders said. “The trees were in very full leaf. And those leaves act like little spoons that hold the snow and it increased the weight and bulk of those tree limbs exponentially.”One estimate shared with CL&P is that the snowstorm caused five times more tree damage than the recent Tropical Storm Irene — which caused quite a bit of damage of its own.“It wasn’t an occasional tree down on the road,” Saunders said. “It was tree after tree after tree.”Many Northwest Corner residents speculated this week about whether it would be better to bury the power lines underground. Saunders warned that, first of all, such a project would be prohibitively expensive.“Our cost of doing business is regulated by the state,” she noted.“But it’s also not the panacea everyone thinks it is. I live in an area where the power lines are underground, and I was without power for five days after Tropical Storm Irene. We were one of the last places in the state to get power back. “Underground lines are not as easy to locate and repair,” she said. Sometimes water gets into underground wires, too, causing additional problems. “Water in the wires might have caused some of the problems this week,” she said. “But the bulk of the damage was caused by the trees. They’re beautiful but ...”To help cut back fallen limbs and repair downed wires and transmitting equipment, CL&P has had 2,665 crews at work, with an average of two workers per crew. “Our normal number of line crews is 200,” Saunders said.They’ve come here from 23 states and two provinces in Canada. “In most cases they’re driving here with their own vehicles,” she said.The trucks have been parked at various spots around the region. Many could be seen in parking lots in nearby towns that had both hotels and power, such as Great Barrington. Lime Rock Park also provided a staging area for many of the crews and their trucks.