Community Corner

UI Target: Less Than 10K Customers without Power by Weekend

The utility said Wednesday that it has 240 crews on the ground in its region.

Saying Hurricane Irene’s widespread damage hampered United Illuminating’s ability to get crew members on the ground and to get its arms quickly around safety issues, the utility on Wednesday estimated that it would reduce total customers without power to 10,000 by the weekend and expects to have town and street-specific information on power restoration Thursday.

UI serves 17 Connecticut towns and cities, including Stratford, Easton, East Haven, Fairfield, Hamden, Milford, North Branford, Orange, Shelton, Trumbull and Woodbridge. Tony Marone, the New Haven-based company’s associate vice president of client services, gave an update on the push to restore power this afternoon.

In Irene’s wake, UI first addressed safety problems such as live wires on the ground, then focused on getting power to municipal officials and emergency responders, he said. Now, the company is working on circuits that feed the greatest numbers of homes so that power is restored effectively to as many people as possible.

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“We think that priority works well. It doesn’t make everyone happy because if you are one of those customers who is without power, you are not satisfied,” Marone said. “[Those customers are thinking] ‘When are my lights going to come back on?’ We recognize that.”

Plans to bring in tree and line workers from as far away as Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Maine and New Hampshire were delayed last week, Marone said. As of Wednesday morning, UI had 240 total crews on the ground in Connecticut -- a crew consists of two to three workers -- and more continue to arrive.

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“We certainly empathize and understand that customers still don’t have power,” Marone said.

“The storm as we all know has been quite significant,” he said. “We had a plan in place, a plan that had been developed since we recognized that the storm is coming, a plan that is now being enacted. That plan has caused us to put into action many, many resources. Right now, every single person at UI is available for storm duty to work 24 hours a day, around-the-clock to get customers back.”

Marone said that before UI could offer any street-specific information on power restoration plans, it needed to address safety issues and get power back to critical groups.

“We today will have evolved to the point where we can start to do that now,” he said. “It’s not just because we’ve just figured out this is a good thing to do. That is because of the volume [of reports of felled trees and down wires] that is coming in the door.”

Here are some figures Marone provided during the press briefing:

  • During the storm’s peak on Sunday, 158,000 of UI’s 330,000 customers were without power.
  • At the end of Monday, 114,000 total customers were without power.
  • As of Wednesday, UI’s region had 3,000 downed trees.

At its peak, Stratford had 9,025 customers without power. As of 2 p.m. Wednesday, 2,724 Stratford subscribers had no power -- an improvement from 39 to 12 percent.

“There’s a range and different towns have different levels of devastation, and what will happen over the next several days, as we go through the next several days of the outage, we’ll continue that same approach, that we will get the maximum number of customers back with the least amount of effort,” Marone said.

“In some areas, in some of the towns that have a lot of trees, some of the more rural areas, we have a lot of devastation -- it impacts just a few customers," he continued. "So those will be the last outages [to be restored] that will probably take well into the weekend and maybe into the early part of next week before every customer is back on. But our hope is that by this weekend, we will have less than 10,000 customers without power.”

How do you think UI is handling the massive power outages? Tell us in the comments section below.


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