Slammed By Isaias: 6,300 Without Power, Hundreds Of Road Hazards

GUILFORD, CT — At midnight Tuesday, Patch received list from police, who'd been inundated with calls, of road hazards as a result of downed trees, tree limbs and in many cases, live power lines.

The spreadsheet list runs for pages and pages and pages.

But while much of Guilford was pockmarked with road hazards making safe travel difficult at best, no power made the matter all the worse. At 7 a.m. Wednesday, almost 600,000 Connecticut Eversource customers are without power.

Lights out

The lights began going out around 3 in the afternoon as Tropical Storm Isaias wind-whipped the region.

By 5:30 p.m. Eversource reported 4,596 Guilford customers are without power.
The utility is reporting that the outage represents nearly 42 percent of the 11,000-plus customers.

By 9 p.m., there were 5000 without power; more than 45 percent of all customers were in the dark overnight.

But since the late afternoon Tuesday, hundreds of customers began commenting on social media saying they could not get through to report their outage.

An emergency official told Patch that the outage map was "hogwash" as many could not even report their power was out.

The utility acknowledged that it was addressing the problem in a Facebook post — which had no shortage of comments from frustrated customers.

"Can’t report outages or any downed trees or wires because every time I called, the automated system hangs up on me. I have tried at least 25 times over the past six hours," wrote one customer.

Come Wednesday morning, with nearly 600,000 in Connecticut still without power, the last update on Facebook from the utility said it has been "working around the clock" to restore power.

There was no shortage of people who said they've not seen an Eversource crew in their communities.