CL&P Customers Furious As Hundreds Of Thousands of Ct Homes & Businesses Still Lack Power

Look Out CL&P, Here Come the Pitchforks

That is the headline on CtNewsJunkie’s top story today:

A lot of Connecticut remains in the dark – literally and figuratively. Utilities are predicting several more days without power and have no timeline or information to offer businesses or residents. Employers along the shoreline who were fortunate to have avoided major damage are forced to remain closed without electricity, or they are creeping along on generators. With flooding on the way, many residents are unable to turn on sump pumps and homeowners on well-water are out of luck. Is there a plan? Read more.

How about families where electricity is needed to operate medical equipment? What steps have been taken to protect those people?

And from a central Connecticut residents who expresses the feeling of many:

This whole outage situation has left me perplexed and pissed off.

 As you know better than anyone, customer service is not one of CL&P’s priorities. That said, the fact that a Tropical Storm — not a hurricane– with average wind speeds of 20 to 30 miles per hour below hurricane-force could knock out power to half the customer base is astounding.

 It’s now the fourth day after the event and 300,000 of their customers are still without power and in all likelihood some folks will be out for at least another week. As you probably saw, places in North Carolina and Virginia where it was an actual hurricane are much further along in restoration.

 How can this be explained? Simply put, it is evident from news reports that the utility has drastically cut the number of its linemen. Their plan, if you want to call it that, was to call in crews from Vermont and New Hampshire and Quebec, apparently oblivious to the fact that those places may have their own fish to fry in the event of a storm. Now they and the state are scrambling to bring in crews from the South and across the country — unreal.

 I say this with the upmost respect to those linemen who are doing heroic, tireless work. They are simply outmanned.

 You may remember after Gloria when it became evident that CL&P had done a woeful job in tree-trimming and taking the necessary steps to prevent their system from crashing. I daresay we will see that again. If they would spend as much money in keeping up their system as they do in hiring lawyers and experts to justify rate increases, we’d all be better off.

 Finally, it occcured to me that maybe the DPUC could have had the guy who was putting in 3 1/2 hour workdays, and others like him, to conduct their own compliance audit of CL&P’s system maintenance. But that would be expecting to much of our ossified state government.