Utility crews continued to work to restore power in icy conditions a day after Christmas. More than 4,700 people were still without power as of 2 p.m. Monday, according to Vermont Emergency Management.
“Often the last outages in a wind event like this one are the most difficult to restore due to the rural nature of our state and the complexity of the damage,” Erica Bornemann, director of Vermont Emergency Management, said in an email.
“We are encouraged by the immense progress that has been made through the holiday weekend in restoring power to Vermonters but we continue to urge safety to those who are still out,” she said.
Vermont has been walloped by big storms two weekends in a row. The second, which struck the state early Friday morning, downed trees and power lines and lead to at least one death and widespread outages across the state.
As of Monday afternoon, there were 1,327 customers without power in Washington County, 1,151 in Orange County and 585 in Chittenden County after what weather experts have dubbed one of the worst storms in recent history.
The damage from Friday’s windstorm was widespread across Washington Electric Co-Op’s territory, which extends from Wheelock to Tunbridge and from Duxbury to the Connecticut River, according to Louis Porter, general manager.
“We had damage across that entire territory — a lot of trees down, a lot of lines down, a lot of broken poles. And each one of those incidents requires work to restore it,” he said.
Almost 45% of the co-op’s customers suffered outages on Friday. Washington Electric brought in outside crews to help with the work, and Porter said he expects the bulk of power outages to be resolved Tuesday or Wednesday. The remaining outages should be cleared up by the end of the week, he said.
“Washington Electric has perhaps the most rural electric utility territory in the Northeast. So that means we have relatively few members for every mile of power line, which means that we have a relatively small number of employees for every mile of power line,” he explained.
In other parts of the state, Green Mountain Power restored power to 93,000 customers and was working on about 800 outages Monday afternoon, spokesperson Kristin Carlson said in an email.
“We expect to have all customers back late today. There could be a few in some very hard hit spots that go into tomorrow, but crews are making a lot of progress,” she said.
While winter is always a tough time for power restoration, the continued cold weather poses a challenge for utility workers, especially on lines that are off road and in deep snow.
“We appreciate the patience of members as we work to bring power back,” Porter said. “We recognize that Christmas is not an ideal time for people to either be out of power or for our crews to have to work through Christmas Eve and Christmas.”
