A blizzard packing tropical-force winds and heavy, wet snow is projected to knock out power to “several hundred thousand” customers in Connecticut through Monday, an unusually high number of outages that could require four to six days to fully restore, a top Eversource official said Sunday.
At a briefing with Gov. Ned Lamont at the Emergency Operations Center in Hartford, the president of Eversource’s subsidiary in Connecticut, Steve Sullivan, warned that high winds expected during much of Monday would limit crews to emergency operations reopening roads.
“Tonight and most of the day tomorrow, our focus will be on fire and police safety incidents, including blocked roads,” Sullivan said. “That’s where we’ll be putting our efforts and our crews, and it really will be Tuesday before we’re going to be starting to make significant progress on restoration.”
Storm preparations, restoration times and fights over the recovery of storm costs all have roiled the relationships of Eversource and the smaller United Illuminating with the Lamont administration since Tropical Storm Isaias caused outages to more than 800,000 customers in August 2020. Full restoration took nine days.
Regulators opened an investigation into the staffing and procedures of Eversource and UI after the event, and the General Assembly acted in special session six weeks later on a bipartisan “Take Back Our Grid” bill that pushed regulators towards performance-based regulation.
On Sunday, Sullivan emphasized the fast-changing nature of forecasts that began with predictions of a coastal storm delivering a glancing blow before evolving Saturday into a meteorological consensus that not only would the storm strike Connecticut but produce blizzard conditions throughout.
He said Eversource activated its emergency response plan Sunday, putting its line workers on alert and bringing in “a very large contingent of external contractors with the intent that they will be able to work tomorrow.”
State officials said the storm bears little resemblance to the one that dumped more than a foot of light, fluffy snow on Jan. 25, causing modest outages that quickly were restored. Last month, the governor delivered a Sunday storm briefing via a video call, lasting just 11 minutes.
Lamont, who returned to Connecticut on Friday night from the National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C., spent Saturday at his home in Greenwich but returned to Hartford on Sunday morning as forecasters warned of multi-day power outages, coastal flooding and wind-driven snow.
“This is not our first snowstorm. We’re in New England, but this is going to be a bad one,” Lamont said Sunday, opening the briefing.
The governor declared a state of emergency. In coordination with Rhode Island, Massachusetts and portions of New York, he prohibited commercial trucks from state highways, beginning at 5 p.m. States offices and courts will be closed Monday.
Lamont and Sullivan demonstrated that politicians and utilities have at least one shared goal about storms and outages: managing expectations before the lights inevitably go out.
“I know how frustrating this can be after a day or so,” Lamont said.
The storm could be the worst in more than a decade, the governor said. Connecticut’s worst outages in the past two decades came from a freak snowstorm on Oct. 29, 2011. Superstorm Sandy landed exactly a year later, with tropical winds and flooding, not snow.
Tropical storms Isaias in 2020 and Irene in 2011 each caused damage that resulted in long restorations. Utilities use a five-level metric for predicting storms and the necessary preparations, with Level 1 being the worst and Level 5 signifying an expectation of localized damage.
A week before Isaias, Eversource notified regulators it had declared a Level 4 event, with the expectation of 125,000 to 380,000 customer outages and 41,500 to 10,000 damage locations. UI declared a more serious Level 3. Until Saturday, the coming blizzard was rated as a Level 5 event.
Eversource uses an Outage Prediction Model developed by UConn to forecast a storm’s impact and assess the need to pre-stage crews. According to UConn and Eversource, the model can provide a 3-day advance picture of a storm’s impact, updated every six hours.
“We’ve been tracking the storm for over a week,” Sullivan said Sunday. “Yesterday, the models came into agreement, and unfortunately, they really came into agreement on a higher-end event. So we really do expect a long-duration, heavy-snow, high-wind event, and those conditions are highly likely to bring numerous trees down onto our system and causing outages.”
Eversource was not alone in upgrading the storm’s expected punch over the weekend. The National Weather Serviced extended its blizzard warning to the entire state, with winds forecasted to gust up to 70 mph from New London to Stonington, 60 miles per hour from Stamford to New Haven, and 55 mph away in Hartford.
“We understand how frustrating it is for our customers to go without power,” Sullivan said. “Our line workers, electricians and support staff, we live in Connecticut. We’re going through the same experience as our customers, but we commit to working around the clock until every last customer is restored and restored safely.”