The state’s largest utilities, heavily criticized for slow responses to major storms last year, appear to be repairing lines and restoring power at a faster pace as the state recovers from widespread damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.
National Grid, for example, had by Tuesday evening restored electricity to roughly half of the 237,000 customers whose lights went out at the storm’s peak. In comparison, a day after a Halloween snowstorm belted New England last year, the utility had restored power to about 25 percent of customers who lost electricity. And after Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011, it took two days to restore power to about half of the National Grid customers with outages.
Comments
I called National Grid twice when we lost power Monday at approx 1:30 pm , and about two hours later just to be sure ... when you call to report a power outage with them , they ask for the account number ... how about the address guys ? that won't suffice ? or how about the phone number attached to our address ... we are calling to report a power outage , no power = no lights , who wants to be digging through bills for account numbers, in the dark for gods sakes. . Within a short period of time after reporting the outage , sure enough , the National Grid power outage map - on their web site - clearly shows our area as "OUT" ... down to the street , the number of customers affected etc ... all out . So here we are two days later , no power , and National Grid is telling the neighborhood it will not be repaired until Nov 3rd , because no one reported the outage in our area ... and ... surprise - I just went on their web site , and it does not show as out - like it did yesterday highlighted in yellow ... so please spare us the glowing praise of National Grid !!
NStar response to this storm has been just as pathetic as in past storms. Twice they have placed automated calls to me to tell me that power has been restored. I can look out my window and see the tree in the road and the wires down. I have reported the issue via phone, website and email multiple times per day.
How is this better Martha?