Community Corner

At Last, Progress on Power Restoration

CL&P is now saying almost all of New Canaan will have power again by Thursday morning.

Four days after the lights went out in much of New Canaan, the town is finally making inroads in the recovery, but the progress has not come without some elbows being thrown.

This morning, the frustration among town officials over the ongoing and widespread power outages was palpable.

"There are trucks sitting around all over town sucking their thumbs waiting for people to tell them where to go," First Selectman Jeb Walker said at the start of a 9 a.m. Board of Selectmen meeting.

Connecticut Light & Power's internal dispatch systems, he said, "seem to be broken."

Rumors of a utility crew work slowdown had been flying, with some saying that CL&P has been unwilling to pay overtime. Walker heralded Governor Jodi Rell's announcement today that the state Department of Public Utility Control and the state Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security would be looking into the slow pace of the response.

After constant pressure from town officials, "from my office on down," Walker said, and the extra shove from the governor, CL&P today stepped up their presence in town and coordination with local recovery efforts.

As of this morning, three crews have been assigned to work directly with New Canaan's Public Works Department to help open up the roads. One CL&P supervisor is working in the town's Emergency Operations Center, and the utility set up a satellite command post on Lakeview Avenue. 

"Once we had face-to-face contact, things started to happen," Walker said.

"They were not going to seek us, we had to seek them and make sure they knew our priorities," Selectman Rob Mallozzi said.

At the top of the list are getting service to the municipal water treatment plant, which is currently operating on a generator and restoring power to the schools so that they can reopen.

While the First Selectman still sounded skeptical at a 3 p.m. briefing, the Director of Customer Operations for CL&P's Western Division, Bruce Bernier, predicted that 99 percent of households in New Canaan would see the lights go back on by midnight Wednesday.

"We went conservative on it," Bernier said of the latest prediction.

Bernier said earlier forecasts that widespread outages would last into the weekend had been based on the manpower commitment from New England to tackle the job; with additional crews drawn from as far away as Ohio, North Carolina, and Quebec CL&P was able to positively revise its estimate.

The utility now has 31 two-man overhead line crews (one man in the truck, one man in the bucket) operating in New Canaan along with 14 tree crews working to pull trunks and branches off power lines. Most of the crews are working during daylight hours, with 25 percent kept on the job overnight.

Bernier said the crews were working 16-hour shifts followed by 8 hours of rest. He suggested that slow-down rumors may have come from out-of-state workers used to longer shifts during emergencies.

"The crews from out-of-state have different schedules of 20, 22 hours—we know [the longer shifts are] just not the right thing to do. They get fatigued and they start making mistakes. We are not going to kill someone restoring power," Bernier said. "A lot of crews are having a difficult time accepting that."

"So I can say there's no labor action whatsoever?," Walker asked.

"That's correct," Bernier said.

Bernier blamed the lack of CL&P's presence in New Canaan before today on the magnitude of the devastation here and the logistics of getting crews from far and wide set up with food and lodging.

"I frankly have not seen such concentrated devastation," he said. "The closest I've seen in the 24 years I've been working would be Hurricane Gloria (which blew through New Canaan in 1985)."

As of 9 p.m., 1,965 New Canaan CL&P customers were left without power—about 23 percent, down from a high of more than 67 percent. That number could fluctuate as the work continues. Some who have had power may lose it as the crews have to shut off circuits to fix the lines. Bernier urged residents to call 1-800-286-2000 if they experience an outage so that the utility is not chasing after a backlog of isolated problems later.


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