Power outages across Mass. could take days to be restored

Weather

“The last couple customers, unfortunately, will be a couple days out,” said Doug Foley, President of Electric Operations at Eversource.

Two Eversource linemen, Justin Sessa and Omer Celik, work on power lines after Monday’s blizzard caused power outages across Eastern Mass. Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe

New England electricity companies are still in the process of restoring power to well over 100,000 customers after a blizzard on Monday took out power across Eastern Massachusetts.

Power companies warn that, for some, the restoration process might take a few days.

“The last couple customers, unfortunately, will be a couple days out,” Doug Foley, President of Electric Operations at Eversource, said at a press conference.

National Grid also told customers that complete power restoration will take time.

“There could be some stragglers that go into Thursday, but we’re going to work really hard to have everybody on by Wednesday night, at midnight,” Chris Laird, COO of New England Electric for National Grid, said at a press conference Tuesday.

Both electricity companies say they worked to restore power to customers all throughout Tuesday.

According to National Grid, more than 94,000 of its customers lost power during the blizzard. As of 7 a.m. on Tuesday, more than 71,000 customers had had their power restored.

As of early Tuesday afternoon, 220,000 Eversource customers were still without power, spokesperson Olessa Stepanova told Boston.com. Eversource had restored 170,000 customers already, she said.

Both companies said the blizzard’s high winds delayed their ability to restore power, with workers unable to go up in bucket trucks to work on electrical wires.

“We had those high winds. We had blizzard conditions. We had snow drifts. We had winds that hit 77 to 80 miles an hour on the Cape. So when that happens, our crews simply can’t go out in bucket trucks,” Stepanova said.

Both companies said they anticipated the storm and coordinated response plans.

“We had crews pre-positioned on Martha’s Vineyard and other places that we knew would be tough to access. We were planning for the storm days ahead, so we knew which areas were expected to get hit hardest, and that’s where we had crews ready to go starting over the weekend,” Stepanova said.

National Grid sent out crews to Nantucket before the storm hit.

“To support restoration efforts on Nantucket, National Grid pre‑positioned crews on the island ahead of the storm and is sending an additional 10 utility and forestry crews today, as workers continue to address damage caused by wind gusts that exceeded 80 mph yesterday,” National Grid said in a statement.

Data shared by electrical companies show that Cape Cod and the Islands were hit hardest by outages, with several towns on the Cape still completely without power Tuesday night.

Both companies said they’ve deployed swarms of personnel. National Grid said it had more than 560 field crews out responding to the power outages.

Eversouce has “thousands of personnel and hundreds of crews, contractor crews, and our crews that are out there all day today, surveying and assessing and doing the restorations,” Stepanova said.