UI Target: Less Than 10K Customers without Power by Weekend

[Editor’s Note: Information for displaced Fairfield residents or those without power on where they can go to shower, get food, coffee and water and other services follows this article.]

Saying ’s hampered United Illuminating’s ability to get crew members on the ground and to get its arms quickly around safety issues, the utility on Wednesday estimated that it would reduce total customers without power to 10,000 by the weekend and expects to have town- and street-specific information on power restoration Thursday.

Towns such as Easton, Orange and Woodbridge, and areas of Fairifeld where wind and rain caused the most damage to power lines by felling trees, such as Greenfield Hill, likely will not be included in that group, Tony Marone, the New Haven-based company’s associate vice president of client services, said during a press briefing at Sullivan-Independence Hall’s second-floor conference room. UI serves 17 Connecticut towns and cities, including Easton, East Haven, Fairfield, Hamden, Milford, North Branford, Orange, Shelton, Stratford, Trumbull and Woodbridge.

In Irene’s wake, UI first addressed safety problems such as live wires on the ground, then focused on getting power to municipal officials and emergency responders. Now, the company is working on circuits that feed the greatest numbers of homes so that power is restored effectively to as many people as possible.

“We think that priority works well. It doesn’t make everyone happy because if you are one of those customers who is without power, you are not satisfied,” Marone said to a room of about 12 people, including First Selectman Mike Tetreau, members of his staff, town officials, media members and residents. “[Those customers are thinking] ‘When are my lights going to come back on?’ We recognize that.”

Plans to bring in tree and line workers from as far away as Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Maine and New Hampshire were delayed last week, Marone said. As of Wednesday morning, UI had 240 total crews on the ground in Connecticut—a crew consists of two to three workers—and more continue to arrive. Of those 240, about 12 are in Fairfield, Marone said.

“We certainly empathize and understand that customers still don’t have power,” Marone said.

“The storm as we all know has been quite significant,” he said. “We had a plan in place, a plan that had been developed since we recognized that the storm is coming, a plan that is now being enacted. That plan has caused us to put into action many, many resources. Right now, every single person at UI is available for storm duty to work 24 hours a day, around-the-clock to get customers back.”

While recognizing that Marone and UI had reached out to him directly during the storm to discuss power and safety issues, Tetreau criticized the utility for failing to provide specific information on what circuits in town were down and how UI prioritized their getting fixed. With that information, Tetreau said, the town would be able to provide residents street-specific information on outages and estimates on restoration.

“That has been an ongoing problem,” Tetreau said.

Marone responded that UI first needed to address safety issues and get power back to critical groups, then take an overall damage assessment. The details Tetreau is seeking likely will be available starting Wednesday, Marone said.

“We today will have evolved to the point where we can start to do that now,” he said. “It’s not just because we’ve just figured out this is a good thing to do. That is because of the volume [of reports of felled trees and down wires] that is coming in the door.”

Fairfield, , experienced during the storm, including homes that on Fairfield Beach Road.

Here are some figures Marone provided during the press briefing:

• During the storm’s peak on Sunday, 158,000 of UI’s 330,000 customers were without power.
• At the end of the first work day [Monday], 114,000 total customers were without power.
• As of Wednesday, UI’s region had 3,000 downed trees.
• At its peak, Fairfield had 16,606 customers without power. As of Wednesday morning, 6,830 Fairfield customers had no power—an improvement from 74 to 29 percent.

“There’s a range and different towns have different levels of devastation, and what will happen over the next several days, as we go through the next several days of the outage, we’ll continue that same approach, that we will get the maximum number of customers back with the least amount of effort,” Marone said. “In some areas, in some of the towns that have a lot of trees, some of the more rural areas, we have a lot of devastation—it impacts just a few customers. So those will be the last outages [to be restored] that will probably take well into the weekend and maybe into the early part of next week before every customer is back on. But our hope is that by this weekend, we will have less than 10,000 customers without power.”

Information for Fairfield residents from the town’s police department:

elderly housing services available as of 3 p.m. Tuesday:

• Delivery of fresh produce by the health department
• 100 flashlights
• transporation to the nearest supermarkets
• delivery of water and coffee on Tuesday morning
• coordination with Claire Grace at the and Roger the housing coordinator
• delivery of water and ice on Wednesday morning

ShopRite supermarket (1975 Black Rock Turnpike) parking lot is the location of the police command post. It is staffed with emergency personnel and volunteers coordinating the distribution of ice, water and flashlights. (Ice has already been delivered and the Shoprite owner offered to provide as much ice as needed to the general public.) The quantity of distribution to each household will be limited to two bags of ice and three 1-liter bottles per day.

services offered:

• Recreation center is open for showers during the day
• Campus center is offering free food from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
• Two townhouses are available for emergency housing only coordinated through the Senior Center

Chips Restaurant (525 Tunxis Hill) is offering free coffee to senior citizens

donated coffee to Parish Court Housing Complex on Tuesday

is open to the public at 5:30 p.m. for free food on a walk-in basis

The following places are available for public showering: