Governor Lamont declared a state of emergency Friday afternoon after surveying damage from a severe thunderstorm Thursday night. Maps provided by United Illuminating show that much of the damage was concentrated in Hamden, North Branford, North Haven and East Haven. The storm has not been confirmed as a tornado.
United Illuminating President and CEO Tony Marone said 29,000 customers lost power Thursday and restoration efforts left 13,000 without power as of Friday morning. He expected teams from across the region to reduce the number significantly today.
In a statement, UI officials said they expect restoration should be substantially complete Saturday.
"The exception will be customers in areas where damage is so severe that crews will have to rebuild the electric system," the statement reads. UI expects those customers to be restored by Monday.
Speaking outside North Haven town hall Friday morning, Lamont encouraged patience from those without power because the concentration of the outages will create a bottleneck effect.
"We can’t get everything on back here in North Haven in the next 12 hours but we can try. It won't be due to manpower because we’ve got so much [damage] concentrated in such a narrow area that we almost could be tripping over each other," Lamont said.
The governor eased fears created by the slow recovery after Tropical Storm Isaias, and said, "we’ve got everything we need to do this as fast and as efficiently as possible."
Lamont and Lt. Gov Susan Bysiewicz had plenty of praise to give to UI for storm preparedness, but there is still frustration with electric utility Eversource. Senator Richard Blumenthal advocated for smaller utility companies, echoing his testimony from Monday.
"Eversource hoped for the best and it prepared for the best, it made a bad bet. We should not be paying that debt," Blumenthal said. "And the best way to prepare for the future is to make steps against climate change, it’s not just talk, it has to be action."
Blumenthal promoted performance-based compensation for utility executives and performance-based rates of return. "That’s our capitalist system after all. In every other industry the rewards are based on how well you deliver the service or the product," he said.
Connecticut has two major electric companies, Eversource, which provides electricity to 149 of the state’s 169 towns, and United Illuminating, which serves 17 towns.
Eversource Responds Amid State-wide Criticism
Eversource says the company is committed to restoring power to hard-hit Branford by midnight Saturday. As of Friday morning, 17,500 Eversource customers were still without power, with 12,000 of those outages in hard-hit Branford.
The utility company has been under fire after a slow restoration of power following tropical storm Isaias. Senator Richard Blumenthal said he’ll be keeping an eye on whether power is restored in Branford over the next 24 hours as promised by the company.
"The vast majority of their crews—they haved 380 here in Connecticut, only 80 of them are here in Branford," Blumenthal said. "I want to know how they are going to restore power here, in the next 24 hours, without those crews being here. I am going to be watching, the people of Connecticut are going to be watching."
Eversource says the crews restoring power in other towns throughout the state will head to Branford, one of the town’s hit hardest by Thursday night’s storm.
"Our dedicated crews are working urgently to continue clearing roads and repair damage, and we estimate that restoration for all towns other than Branford will be substantially complete by midnight [Friday]," Eversource President of Regional Electric Operations Craig Hallstrom said in a statement. "We know the timing couldn’t have been worse for our customers affected by these storms, and we’ll continue working the extreme sense of urgency that they deserve until all of our customers have power again."
