Lamont Activates National Guard To Help With Power Problems

CONNECTICUT — Gov. Ned Lamont on Thursday activated the Connecticut National Guard to assist utility companies with power restoration efforts as hundreds of thousands have gone more than 48 hours without electricity.

Members of the guard will work in four teams to help state and local governments remove large debris from roadways. Two teams will support United Illuminating and two will support Eversource.

The National Guard has lent a hand after other major weather events including the May 2018 microburst and tornado storm. It also helped during the coronavirus pandemic by building field hospitals and delivering personal protective equipment.

State officials, United Illuminating and Eversource held a meeting Thursday to coordinate the effort to get power back to critical facilities such as public safety, government buildings and nursing homes.

UI plans to have the majority of its customers back online by the end of Saturday. Eversource still hasn’t provided an estimate and said it plans to do so by the end of Thursday.

The state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority has launched an investigation into Eversource and UI’s preparation and response to the storm.

PURA will investigate whether civil penalties can be levied. Those would come from shareholders and not ratepayers, said Katie Dykes, commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

Lamont said his philosophy has been to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but it appears that Eversource didn’t do that with the storm.

“I think that Eversource didn’t plan for the worst, I don’t think they had the people staged in place ready to go as soon as we saw the scope of what was happening,” Lamont said.

Generators are providing power for many critical buildings, but they can’t last forever, he said.

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The state Department of Labor is running off of an old generator, Lamont said, and unemployment claims for 300,000 residents could be impacted if that generator fails.

Around a third of nursing homes were without power Thursday and in the majority of cases they kicked over to generator backup power. In one case a generator failed, but it was quickly fixed, Lamont said.

Cell towers impacted by the outage are running off battery backup power, but service may be slowed down, Lamont said.

Electricity is even critical to feed hundreds of thousands of chickens in the state and to keep their living area properly ventilated, Lamont said.

See related: Eversource Vastly Underestimated Power Outages: Report

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