Updated at 4:43 p.m.
Power was coming back on for thousands of Vermonters on Saturday afternoon as the region’s second significant wind storm of the week wound down — though many remained unconnected.
VTOutages, which uses data from utilities to show the number of statewide power outages at any one time, showed a high on Saturday above 28,000 outages around 11 a.m.
That figure had dropped by nearly half by 4:30 p.m., with about 15,000 outages reported.
Rutland County and other western parts of the state appeared hardest hit overnight, with many Northeast Kingdom communities losing power Saturday morning.
Seth Kutikoff, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Burlington office, said strong wind gusts throughout the state overnight had particularly targeted the communities in the western slopes of the Green Mountains, which had also suffered during a powerful wind storm that hit Tuesday night.
After utility crews spent days restoring power to tens of thousands of customers, outages fell as low as 380 Friday night, according to VTOutages, before they began rising steadily again around 2 a.m. Saturday as winds picked up again.
Speaking Saturday morning, Kutikoff said the latest storm had not been as strong as the one that hit earlier in the week, and that verified wind gusts were “a little less” than the maximums of 70 mph that had been forecast, hitting 58 mph in Enosburg. However, he noted that there were some reports of stronger winds that were “difficult to verify.”
New England 511 reported a few roads closed on Saturday morning due to impacts from the storm. By the afternoon, Route 116 in Middlebury from Quarry Road to Cobble Road remained impassable, it showed.
Kutikoff said Vermonters could expect a calm Saturday night ahead of an afternoon of “gusty snow showers” on Sunday afternoon, when travel could be difficult.
