Lamont, who made the declaration while touring damage in portions of central Connecticut, will meet with Eversource’s CEO on Wednesday afternoon.
“We’re doing everything we can to impress upon them the urgency. I’ve got seniors at home with no electric or no energy, and I’ve got to make sure it’s not for a lack of manpower,” Lamont said.
Eversource was reporting more than 617,000 outages by midday Wednesday, while United Illuminating, which serves residents in southern Connecticut, was reporting more than 103,000.
Officials with Eversource said crews are still working to assess the extent of the damage to the electrical infrastructure, but it will take “multiple days” to restore the power to all the customers.
“The impact from this storm, in terms of power outages, is greater than Superstorm Sandy. The fierce winds with this storm caused widespread power outages and historic damage, affecting customers in all of the 149 communities we serve in Connecticut,” said Eversource Vice President of Electric Operations in Connecticut Michael Hayhurst in a statement. “We are taking to the skies to conduct a detailed damage assessment of our 17,000 miles of overhead equipment and using patrollers on the ground, so we can efficiently deploy our resources to get power restored for all of our customers.”
Lamont, touring storm damage in Wethersfield Wednesday morning, agreed it will be at least a few days before power is fully restored.
“I don’t want to overpromise, it will be at least a few days,” he said.
Lamont said Eversource had 1,000 crews working and more were arriving from northern New England. Southwest Connecticut was hit most severely by the storm, Lamont said, but damage was widespread across the state.
Wethersfield Mayor Mike Rell said 65% of his town was without power and 30 roads were blocked. People living in an apartment building in the town that had its roof torn off during the height of the storm Tuesday spent the night in local hotels, he said.
United Illuminating was also warning residents that it could take several days to restore power.
Elected officials were already finger-pointing at Eversource, the state’s dominant electric utility, saying they were unprepared for the storm. The criticism comes on top of customers’ and legislators’ outrage over recently approved rate hikes that have since been suspended.
“PURA routinely reviews and approves some form of customer rate increase for Eversource to pay for electrical system ‘hardening’ so Eversource’s infrastructure becomes more resilient to storms over the years,” said Sen. Norm Needleman, an Essex Democrat who also serves as the town’s first selectman. “My question is, where has all that money gone? What did customers get for their investment in Eversource? Why isn’t Eversource investing in and hiring new linemen? We’ve got nearly three-quarters of a million people without power in Connecticut today – including nearly all of Essex – which is about the same number of people who lost power during that devastating ice storm in April 2011. It seems very little has changed with Eversource over the past decade, now matter how much money consumers throw at them.”
Needleman planned a news conference Wednesday afternoon with other elected officials at Essex Town Hall to discuss Eversource’s response to the storm.
“We’re working on it ... that’s the best I can do right now” Mitch Gross, another Eversource spokesman, told WVIT-TV when asked when people can expect to find out when they can get power.
“Following damage assessment, we are making sure the essential services are taken care of. Hospitals, water treatment facilities, police, fire, making sure they are up and running,” he said. “Then we go to work to restore the greatest number of customers at a single time. We look at the circuits, we look at the situations. How can we restore the greatest block of customers at a single time? From there, we continue on.”
One central Connecticut municipal leader who did not want to speak officially said Eversource didn’t even dispatch assessment teams until Wednesday morning.
The Eversource liaison with that community provided only spotty information all Tuesday night and was working from home without power or internet access, the official said.
The utility was not following its usual practice of coordinating with local public works departments about which transmission lines to repair and when, the official said.
“Usually they let us know where they’re going, our truck follows theirs - so when they clear the line, we can move the trees,” the official said.
A primary transmission line was on fire at one point just after the storm; an Eversource contact promised to assign staff to help with that, but after a long delay the town’s fire department had to deal with the fire on its own, the official said.
West Hartford Town Manager Matt Hart said he and other town officials have been in touch with a liaison from Eversource, but cannot say when power will be restored.
Hart said he was told Eversource is focusing on responding to priority 1 calls, which are calls where peoples’ safety could be affected.
“In terms of large scale restoration, they are not focused on that just yet,” Hart said, adding he has not been given a time frame for when power will be restored in West Hartford. “We are anticipating that this will be a multi-day event in terms of power restoration.”
As of noon Wednesday, 53 percent of Eversource customers in West Hartford are out of power.
Town crews are working to clear roadways of down trees, but in some cases cannot do anything until Eversource crews ensure wires brought down by the falling trees are no longer energized. The town has also called in contractors to assist public works crews with clearing trees from roads. The storm caused considerable tree damage across the state, which brought down electric and other wires. “It’s right up there, a notch or two below Sandy and some of the other big storms of the last decade,” Hart said.
“We’re primarily focused on getting the roads open,” Hart said, adding that many traffic signals are down. In those cases, the town is putting stop signs at the intersections.
In New Britain, Eversource reported 5,705 customers — mostly residential — were powerless as of 10 a.m. Wednesday. The utility said 25 transformers were out of service, said Justin Dorsey, chief of staff for Mayor Erin Stewart.
“We just had a call with Eversource. They said they sent out a damage assessment team this morning, they had no ETA on restoration,” Dorsey said late Wednesday morning.
State parks will remain closed Wednesday after experiencing extensive damage to trees, state officials said.
By late morning, more than two dozen state roads remained closed for debris or wires in the road.
At least one person was killed during the storm by a falling tree, but the extent of any other injuries and the full scope of the damage was not known.
A 66-year-old Naugatuck man died just after 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, during the height of the storm, when he tried to remove branches from in front of his vehicle on Andrew Mountain Road and was struck by another falling tree, Naugatuck police said late Tuesday night. The man, who was not identified publicly, died at the scene.
Officials from across Connecticut were reporting large swaths of downed trees, blocked roadways and damaged infrastructure as they braced residents for a lengthy cleanup. A number of towns have issued a state of emergency.
At least a dozen towns were reporting more than 90 percent of homes and businesses without power.
Damage through central Connecticut was scattered: In the heart of New Britain, restaurants and gas stations were largely open. Near Central Connecticut State University, though, most were closed.
Burlington roads looked like a battle zone Tuesday evening, and were only marginally better by Wednesday morning.
Just a couple of minutes away, Canton’s business district and the Colinsville village center were doing business as usual. Several shops and cafes even had lawn signs and outdoor restaurant seating in place.
But a few miles farther east on Route 44, the busy commercial corridor in Simsbury and Avon was dark. Eastbound traffic backed up from Route 167 - where the traffic light was out - to all the way to the closed La Trattoria restaurant.
In Burlington, the town center was still dark, the south end of Route 69 was still impassable and calls to town hall couldn’t go through. Many residential streets had tree limbs blocking one lane - or wire-entangled trees closing the whole street.
The storm, which moved in with an unexpected speed, struck southwestern Connecticut by about 1 p.m., but spread across western and central Connecticut in little over an hour, bringing gusts upwards of 60 miles per hour and soaking rain. The rain left by late afternoon, but powerful winds lingered.
Despite sporadic tornado warnings, There were no definitive reports of tornadoes as of Wednesday afternoon, but wind damage was reported through much of the state.
Courant staff writers Christine Dempsey, Zach Murdock, Dave Owens and Don Stacom contributed to this story.
Nicholas Rondinone can be reached at nrondinone@courant.com.
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