In Sandy's wake, utility firms gain quickly on last of the outages

Nov 1 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Oliver Jenkins Foster's Daily Democrat, Dover, N.H.

While hundreds of Seacoast residents were still without power Wednesday as the region cleaned up from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, utility companies are steadily restoring service to customers statewide.

According to Public Service of New Hampshire's online outage graph, 368 customers in Durham, 345 customers in Dover, and 207 customers in Rochester were still without power as of 5 p.m. Wednesday night. Other areas still reporting sizable outages at 5 p.m. were Portsmouth, 157, Newmarket, 121, and Somersworth, 79.

Accelerating restoration efforts, 150 workers from Hydro Quebec arrived Wednesday afternoon and joined PSNH crews and contractors already in the field. Aided by others, including crews from as far away as Texas and Oklahoma, PSNH expects its restoration efforts to be substantially completed by Friday evening.

A total of 33,000 PSNH customers throughout the state remained without power Wednesday night -- compared to 137,000 who lost power at the height of Sandy's wrath.

The majority of the Canadian crews from Hydro Quebec were assigned to work in the southern part of New Hampshire, which was hit considerably harder than the rest of the state.

While significant progress was made Wednesday, the greatest number of customers still without power were in communities near the southern I-93 corridor, and westerly to greater Keene, as well as the area north of Rochester.

Crews reported numerous trees down, and have worked assisting municipal workers in the safe clearing of roadways. A comprehensive assessment of damage and the work to be done has been ongoing in order to plan how to most effectively make repairs and restore power to all customers.

Unitil, another major provider of electricity in New Hampshire, has completed its restoration efforts in the state with the exception of individual service issues and some other isolated pockets.

The company's emergency operations center closed at 6 p.m. Wednesday and will return to normal operations. The seacoast regional center will remain open until individual service issues are resolved.

"We'd like to thank our crews and employees for their hard work, but especially our customers for their patience and our local first responders for their aid during this unprecedented storm, Rich Francazio, Unitil Director of Emergency Management said Wednesday.

Central Maine Power on Wednesday night said it expected to restore power later that evening to its remaining 650 York County customers left in the dark.