Wind leads to massive amounts of power outages across Connecticut
Thousands of Connecticut residents spent big parts of their Presidents Day without any power, thanks to the strong wind gusts that started Sunday night.
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Thousands of Connecticut residents spent big parts of their Presidents Day without any power, thanks to the strong wind gusts that started Sunday night.
According to Eversource spokesperson Jamie Ratliff, the issue was more than just the wind - but also the ice that had built up from Saturday's wintery storm.
"Some of those branches and tree limbs that were already weakened by that thick coating of ice are really far more susceptible and more likely to fall with just a small gust of wind," Ratliff explained.
Some of those branches fell down on to power lines, including in the Rowayton section over Norwalk, where Eversource's website listed over 500 people without power thanks to a wire that came down on Highland Avenue overnight.
Spencer Jacobson was still awake at 1:30 a.m. and said, "I remember just a green flash of light outside the window outside the window, and then everything shut off."
Another one of his neighbors tells News 12 that he woke up in the middle of the night, and "I saw I had the emergency lamps, and the red dot was out, and I said ‘Doesn't look good.’"
While both said crews got there pretty quickly, work was still going on when the neighborhood was waking up hours later.
"I looked over and my phone still wasn't charging, I knew it wasn't coming back on," said Jacobson. "The whole house just dropped to 40-something degrees."
And with no heat, that meant Jacobson spent his cold morning "getting the generator up, going to get gas, going to get coffee."
His neighbor meanwhile chose to stay home, saying that even though it was cold, "You have to dress accordingly, you have to adjust."
While most people in that area started to get their power back around noon, Ratliff said each outage has its own unique timeline.
"The estimated time of restoration really varies depending on the outage, the outage location," she explained, adding that "some of those side roads are a little bit more icy, a little bit more difficult to navigate."
Eversource officials say outages will keep popping up as long as the wind keeps going.
They say if your power goes out, the best thing is to report it, and make sure it's on their radar.
Customers can report an outage here.
