CHESHIRE, Conn. — President of Regional Electric Operations Craig Hallstrom Thursday addressed the criticized response effort as hundreds of thousands remain in the dark following Tropical Storm Isaias.
He said the crews are working tirelessly to restore power, noting, “I'd be remiss if I didn’t give a shoutout to our crews. They left their families and are working 24-7.”
He said there are “north of 700” crews out working on restoring power across the state with 500 to 600 wire down crews and damage assessors in place. There is also an expected 1,200 crew members set to arrive in Connecticut Thursday and Friday.
Hallstrom said during the first 24 hours after the storm, they focused on safety for the public and crews and work with communities to unblock roads, allowing for emergency services to pass through.
While Hallstrom wouldn’t commit to a specific date for complete restoration, he said: “by end of the weekend, we’ll have a large chunk of customers restored.”
The press conference comes after Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) officially announced they will be investigating Eversource and United Illuminating's response to Tropical Storm Isaias. The announcement came after Governor Ned Lamont, critical of Eversource's response efforts, called for an investigation.
Gov. Lamont had asked PURA a list of requests:
- Consider whether the utilities were adequately prepared and have the resources they need to handle large weather events
- Evaluate their response and whether it met regulatory and statutory requirements
- Determine whether their investments went towards their outage response system
- Determine whether civil penalties should be applied
PURA said they will examine, in detail, measures each company took in preparation for this storm, which caused widespread power outages and lengthy service restoration timelines, as well as reasons behind the clear misstep in response.
FOX61 spoke with an Eversource representative, Frank Poirot, Thursday morning.
Poirot had said they had been restoring power ever since Tuesday, even during the storm when it was safe enough. When the winds had subsided, they were able to work more, and since Tuesday they were able to restore about 250,000 customers.
According to Poirot, hundreds of crews were already in place on Tuesday for the storm. On Wednesday, hundreds more had come down from Canada, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Several hundred more crews will join Eversource today, the company said.
Poirot said that since Isaias was a regional storm and impacted states where they also have a presence, they had to look outside their region to try and bring additional crews in. COVID-19 was reportedly not an issue in finding crews.
As far as restoration estimate times, Poirot says they can't accurately put a time out that people could plan around until their damage assessment in all 149 towns in their service area is done. In order to get to the damage, sometimes trees blocking the road have to be removed and they work with local road crews to do that.
But what about all that tree trimming after the October 2011 snowstorm?
Poirot said they have been budgeted $3 million for tree trimming this year and have been "ambitious" when it came to tree trimming.
He indicated that a lot of the incidents out there right now occurred from trees that were far off from the road on private property, but were so tall that when they fell, they managed to still bring the lines down.
Poirot said that in order to avoid a situation like this again, they would have to expand their scope to those trees which "doesn't seem like a practical response".
Poirot went on to say that due to Eversource's resiliency program, there was less damage then there would have been due to equipment upgrades.
Poles have been replaced by sturdier ones and the hardware they use to keep transmissions and wires on the pole has also been replaced.
Eversource reminds customers to always stay clear of downed wires and to report them immediately to 9-1-1.
Be sure to report any outage online at www.eversource.com, or by calling 800-286-2000.
Customers who signed up for the company’s two-way texting feature can send a text to report an outage and receive outage updates as they happen.