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. A quarter of East Haven remains without power.

Saying 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.

Towns such as Easton, Orange and Woodbridge, and areas of Fairifeld likely will not be included in that group, Tony Marone, the New Haven-based company’s associate vice president of client services, said during a press briefing at Fairfield Town Hall. UI serves 17 Connecticut towns and cities, including Easton, East Haven, Fairfield, Hamden, Milford, North Branford, Orange, Shelton, Stratford, Trumbull and Woodbridge.

As of 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 26 percent of East Haven was without electricity, down from 50 percent on Sunday.

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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. 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.

“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.”

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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. Of those 240, about 12 are in Fairfield, Marone said.

“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 place 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 UI first needed to address safety issues and get power back to critical groups, then take an overall damage assessment.

“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 the first work day [Monday], 114,000 total customers were without power.
  • As of Wednesday, UI’s region had 3,000 downed trees.

“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. 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.”


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