Unitil Corporation, (Unitil.com), a provider of natural gas and electricity to customers in New England, is continuing a multi-day power restoration effort that will include sending additional crews to the hardest hit areas and activating its new mobile command center for the first time.
As of 6:30 a.m., just over 10,650 customers were still without power following the intense nor’easter that began impacting the region on Monday, which is down from a peak of 18,600 around mid-day on Tuesday. Of those remaining customers, just over 10,350 were in Massachusetts and approximately 300 were in New Hampshire. The storm has impacted approximately 33,000 customers over the duration of the event with power being restored to more than 24,000.
The nor’easter brought nearly two feet of heavy, wet snow and gusty winds to parts of Unitil’s service territory in Massachusetts and lesser, but still impactful, snowfall to areas in New Hampshire.
Given the extent of the outages in Massachusetts, Unitil has deployed its mobile command unit to the Ashby, Mass., area to support the company’s response to the storm in that region. The unit will serve as a mobile office and centralized communications hub, to assist with the management of field resources and operations.
“The mobile command center is a key asset that will play a critical role as our crews work to restore power to all of our impacted customers. Since many functions can be handled directly from the new mobile unit, this will really help to improve efficiency and reduce the time that it takes to receive and process information from the field,” Unitil Media Relations Manager Alec O’Meara said.
Now that the storm has passed and conditions have improved, Unitil will begin its damage assessment phase to get a clearer picture of the extent of the damage to ultimately provide an estimate of how long it may take to restore all customers. The process will involve sending damage assessors into the field to survey the impacted areas. Assessors must look at the entire system to determine all of the jobs that need to be completed. With that information, Unitil then looks at the number of crews that it has available and determines the number of hours that it will likely take to complete each job. After the calculation is made, the company will be able to provide a clear estimate of when power should be restored. The information is then shared with customers and estimated times of restoration (ETRs) are added to the Unitil Outage Map.
While the company secured third-party crews in advance of the storm, fresh crews from New York arrived Tuesday night to begin work this morning and additional crews from as far away as Pennsylvania will arrive later today.
Unitil reminds customers that in the event of downed wires, assume all cables and wires that have fallen or dangling are energized and stay away. Be sure to avoid wet ground or puddles near a downed line because water conducts electricity. In addition, keep away from all flooded and debris laden areas because they may be hiding downed lines. Stay in a safe place and avoid driving in damaged areas so you don’t interfere with rescue and restoration efforts.
Unitil will be communicating throughout the event through Public Service Announcements (PSAs), our website, our customer call center, and through the media. We also encourage customers to follow along with our storm updates via Facebook, our Twitter feed (@Unitil) and we will be providing real-time outage information online at unitil.com/map.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR MEDIA:
Unitil asks that when reporting outage information, outlets time stamp the information. Outage numbers change hourly and we wish to make sure the information customers receive is consistent and understandable. Re-Tweets and re-posting of old information without referencing a time can create confusion.
Customers experiencing outages should call 1-888-301-7700 or report online at unitil.com/report-outage.
