Utilities Have Strategy to Restore Power

All of the utilities restore power using pretty much the same strategies.
Lines that get restored first are emergency services, hospitals and elderly facilities.
They then target major repairs at substations and main circuits.
Then crews repair lines that will bring the most customers on, like 500 at once, rather than just ten.
That can make it frustrating for customers – they’ll see utility crews in the area, but at their house, still no power.
PSNH spokesman Martin Murray gives the example of Peterborough –where much of the town has no power.
PSNH1 “the major lines feeding Peterborough from two directions, north and south, were hit very badly, until those major lines on the outskirts of town are fixed, it doesn’t matter whether we fix the line inside Peterborough or not they’ll still not get their power back.”
Murray says towns in the Western part of the state are also some of the hardest hit by the storm, including New Ipswich, Jaffrey, Rindge, Troy and Richmond.
Also hard hit were Nashua Hudson and Derry.
PSNH has now issued an online report that lists towns and expected dates when restoration will be 95-percent complete.
Murray2 “A report like that does really give us a deadline and that’s why we are careful about providing that information and that’s why some of the towns will have a disclaimer saying we’re not prepared yet to say when most customers in this town will have their power back”
As of Tuesday evening, PSNH had about 45 towns where it’s still unclear when power will be restored.
PSNH’s peak outage during this storm was 322-thousand, nearly two-thirds of its customers – last night 90-thousand still had no power.
The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative still has about 4-thousand 700 outages remaining yesterday.
They were primarily focusing on restoring power in the Raymond district, which have lines with the largest outages, including Derry.
But spokesperson Amanda Conaway says they’ve come a long way since their peak of 45,000 outages.

“Our hardest hit area was like Belknap and Rockingham County, and Rockingham County still has the majority of our members off we’ve restored almost everything in Belknap, we don’t really have anything in Sullivan County and Merrimack County has pretty much all been brought back up”

The cooperative has a real time map online, showing the locations where power is out.
Customers should be able to judge where power might be restored first, based on the size of the outages.
At Unitil, spokesperson Stephanie Schuyler says 75-thousand customers were without power during the peak of the storm.
The majority-about 50-thousand- were in the Seacoast.
She says they’ve made significant progress since then.

"So if you compare 50-thousand to 10-thousand still out, I know for those 10-customers it doesn’t matter, but for 40-thousand customers at least they have their power restored and they can start to help out their other neighbors who are still struggling with the lack of power."

She calls the devastation from the ice storm humongous.

"this is just an unprecedented event, we understand customers are at the end of their rope with this, one thing I’d ask is when they see crews, know that they’re doing the best that they can"
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.