A behind-the-scenes look at Isaias’ impact in Connecticut
Tropical Storm Isaias ripped through the state, downing trees and power
lines and even whipping up a tornado in one southern Connecticut town. About 1 million lost power — some for more than a week — and businesses, already struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, were dealt another blow. Today, Hearst Connecticut Media analyzes the preparation for the storm and its aftermath. For some, the prolonged outages were an inconvenience coping with hot days without air conditioning, internet and finding alternatives for working from home. But for others, it posed serious health risks for the elderly, disabled and those who depend on refrigerated medication. Gov. Ned Lamont’s office and local elected leaders also provide their perspective — and frustration — with how the outages were handled and what needs to happen next time.
It’s been nearly three weeks since Tropical Storm Isaias whipped through the state, bringing down branches, trees, power lines and expectations of effective cooperation between utility companies and public officials.
As outage numbers reached about 1 million statewide, it wasn’t long before finger-pointing began about who was to blame as customers dealt without power for hours, days, and, for some, more than a week.
The recriminations won’t end anytime soon. But a behind-the-scenes look at how the storm and recovery unfolded for homeowners, business people and public officials offers lessons about what went wrong and what could be done better the next time a big storm batters the state.
The storm preparations began on July 26 with Eversource tracking Hurricane Isaias, which was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in Connecticut.
Bethel First Selectman Matt Knickerbocker said his town was notified of the brewing tropical storm five days before Isaias pummeled the region. Because the town was in the middle of stripping and resurfacing roads, the public works department adjusted its schedule to ensure the roads would be covered when the storm arrived.
“The last thing you want to have when a hurricane’s coming is an exposed road,” Knickerbocker said, because “the road will quite literally be washed away.”
The town fire department began preparing with pump-out work in the event of flooding, and inspected generators residents had lent in case power went out it.
In Westport, First Selectman Jim Marpe said the town became aware of the storm’s potential about a week before Isaias swept through his community with force, producing a minor tornado that tore the roof off a home in the Saugatuck Shores neighborhood.
One day before the storm, Eversource made sure liaisons assigned to each municipality coordinated the efforts of local public works crews and utility linemen, Knickerbocker said.
During Irene and Sandy, a liaison with the power company slept on a cot in town hall while recovery options were underway. In the aftermath of Isaias, the communication was more complicated with the liaison working remotely while also managing other communities, Knickerbocker said.
Other municipalities were facing their own challenges. Westport’s normal Eversource liaison retired just days before the storm, leaving the town with a newcomer who was not familiar with the community, Marpe said.
Isaias bears down
Five days before the storm hit Connecticut, United Illuminating sent a notice to customers, warning them of the start of hurricane season, including Isaias.
According to a press release, UI began preparing its crews and equipment on July 31, as well as soliciting contractors to provide additional help.
In an Aug. 3 filing with the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, UI predicted a Level 3 event, meaning the company expected Isaias to knock out power to 30 to 50 percent of its customers. The company’s prediction turned out to be on target with 37 percent of customers losing power at the peak of the outages, a UI spokesman said.
Eversource anticipated a smaller, Level 4 event, predicting 10 percent to 29 percent of customers — or 130,000 to 380,000 — would be affected. It ultimately proved to be a drastic underestimate.
As the utilities tried to gauge the storm’s strength, emails provided to Hearst Connecticut Media show Gov. Ned Lamont’s office was first notified of Isaias’ path of potential destruction at noon July 31.
Douglas Glowacki, emergency management program specialist for the state, sent an email with “high importance” to Paul Mounds, Lamont’s chief of staff. In the July 31 email, Glowacki warned the governor’s office of the storm’s potential: 40 to 60 mph winds and 4 to 6 inches of rain were coming this way, he wrote.
With the storm looming, Eversource on Aug. 1 contracted to bring 120 crews from Canada to supplement its own workers who were already engaged in storm prep efforts in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Craig Hallstrom, regional president of electric operations for Eversource, said crews from the south were not available.
“Mutual aid crews were holding pending the advancing storm,” Hallstrom wrote in a narrative he prepared for Hearst Connecticut Media, explaining Eversource’s preparation and response to the storm.
With the storm just two days away, Glowacki sent the governor’s office an update the morning of Aug. 2.
Isaias had been downgraded to a tropical storm, he informed top state officials that included Mounds, Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection Commissioner James Rovella, the state’s Chief Operating Officer Josh Geballe and Lamont’s communications director Max Reiss.
“All major models are now in very good agreement on the track and timing of T.S. Isaias,” Glowacki wrote.
Emergency prep
Around 11 a.m. Aug. 2, White House aide Nic Pottebaum emailed Mounds, inquiring whether there were unmet federal needs in the state’s response arsenal.
Mounds, who worked for U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal during the 2011 and 2012 storms that knocked out power and led to some regulatory reforms of the state’s power companies, knew tree-covered Connecticut could be in trouble. Mounds said he began to worry about strong winds leading to long-term outages.
He called an emergency preparation meeting with Geballe, the rest of Lamont’s central office staff, as well as the state Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security on Aug. 2.
One day before the storm, Eversource issued a warning to customers about the potential impact of Isaias — and that outages could last longer due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Working under the challenging conditions related to the pandemic, our crews are positioned around the state and ready to respond to any damage or outages caused by Tropical Storm Isaias,” Eversource Vice President of
Electric Operations Mike Hayhurst said. “Our team will work around-the-clock to restore power as quickly and safely as possible — yet some restorations may take longer as we work to ensure the safety of our employees and customers.”
In Danbury, Hunter Road resident Ellen Blasi said she prepared for the storm by stocking up on water and nonperishable food.
“I did go and get paper plates and stuff … I didn’t expect to be out of power for eight days," she said.
In Hartford, the governor’s staff and state officials discussed the state’s preparedness and plans for a worst-case scenario. That day, members of Lamont’s legal team drafted a Civil Preparedness Emergency Declaration, a letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency asking for a presidential emergency declaration, and a never-used travel ban for roadways during the storm.
‘Unprecedented’ damage
Hours before the storm on Aug. 4, Eversource used forecasts and prediction models to project between 3,000 and 6,000 damage locations, Hallstrom said.
At noon, UI issued one final warning to customers: Tropical Storm Isaias was about to arrive.
The storm hit Connecticut in the early afternoon hours, quickly knocking out power in all 17 municipalities in UI’s territory. In total, the company said the storm resulted in 1,700 outage-causing events, 150 broken poles and more than 1,000 downed wires. Eversource’s territory was getting pounded. Isaias moved faster than expected but with less rain. Connecticut lay on the windward side as the storm passed just to the west.
“Eversource was fully prepared for a major outage event,” Hallstrom said. “However, by 6 p.m., our system had already incurred approximately 5,300 damage locations.
“This scale of damage in such a short time period was unprecedented and substantially beyond the scale indicated by weather forecasts,” he said.
As the storm lashed Westport, a waterspout formed near Compo Beach around 1:40 p.m. After the winds died down, 97 percent of Eversource customers in Westport were left without power.
Shortly before the tornado blew through Westport, Blasi said she heard an enormous crash from the basement of her Danbury home, where she had sought shelter after receiving a tornado warning.
When she emerged, she and her neighbors found a large oak tree leaning into a cracked utility pole laced with utility wires — completely sealing off the road to vehicular traffic.
“I looked at the street and I was like, ‘oh (expletive),’” she said. “I was expecting to be out for a few days. But I also felt like because this street was completely cut off, it would be sooner rather than later.”
Standing in the state’s Emergency Operations Center, Lamont addressed the public around 4 p.m. as the storm continued to pound the state.
After the nine-minute briefing, Lamont and his team hunkered down for the evening. A
tornado warning for the Hartford area blared across the television in the EOC conference room.
“We were truly preparing for the worst and being ready to react to the worst,” Mounds said.
At 8 p.m., Eversource escalated the storm to a Level 3, expecting up to 650,000 outages and up to 25,000 damage locations.
Hundreds of Eversource crew members worked through the night, attempting to address the most severe outage-causing events in what began more than a week of restoration in all 149 communities served by the utility company.
Municipal crews and utility linemen usually work in tandem during major storm events, with public works crews clearing fallen debris out of roads and a “make-safe” team of linemen to assess electrical wires and take care of live ones.
But in Isaias’ aftermath, many municipal officials said the make-safe crews were nowhere to be found.
By nightfall on Aug. 4, Knickerbocker said Bethel public works crews had cleared “every road blockages that did not have wires involved.”
“We were not provided with any make-safe crews until Friday [at] five o’clock,” he said, despite pleas that the town had roads blocked by downed trees and utility wires.
Left in the dark
In the 24 hours following the storm, UI returned power to roughly a quarter of its customers. According to a UI spokesman, the company first focused on clearing blocked roads, and in coordination with municipalities, assessing damage and assigning priorities.
As of 10 a.m. Aug. 5, Eversource said it restored power to more than 100,000 customers, though another 617,000 remained in the dark.
Lamont began surveying the damage, making his first stop in Wethersfield at 10:45 a.m.
He signed the emergency declaration that morning, as more than 700,000 people were still without power and one person had died during the storm. As Lamont visited more towns throughout the day, he grew increasingly displeased about how little had been done to restore power.
The governor called a meeting with Eversource executives for that afternoon — almost exactly 24 hours after the storm first made landfall in Connecticut.
The executives, including company chairman and CEO James Judge, admitted to Lamont’s team they had prepared for a smaller storm, confirming what PURA Chairman Marissa P. Gillett had already reported.
Lamont emerged from the meeting to address the media in front of the Eversource office. Judge was nowhere in sight, instead sending Hallstrom. Lamont called on the utility company to immediately send more people out to restore power.
An hour later, Lamont called on PURA to investigate Eversource’s response and submitted the request for federal aid to FEMA.
A promise and a declaration
During a unified command call the next morning, Lamont again reiterated the need for “utilities to get more people on the ground,” and activated the Connecticut National Guard, according to summary notes of the Aug. 6 meeting provided to Hearst Connecticut Media.
More than 48 hours after the storm, more than 600,000 customers still remained without power.
Mounds was receiving reports from legislators and municipal leaders about Eversource workers apparently being instructed to skip the make safe protocol.
Many wastewater treatment plants, public drinking water systems and 77 nursing homes or skilled care facilities were operating generator power — and at least one had already failed.
Cellphone service providers AT&T, Frontier and Verizon all reported hundreds of portable generators were being deployed to towers that lost power and all three companies asked for points of contact at Eversource and UI, according to information provided to Hearst Connecticut Media.
The Connecticut Department of Transportation reported 93 state road closures, and Metro-North was down between Stamford and New Haven. DOT Commissioner Joe
Giuletti was also still waiting to hear from Eversource about how and where to deploy his agency’s assistance.
“Going through the previous administration, and working for Sen. Blumenthal when those storms hit in 2011 and 2012, I knew that with a heavily-treed state that we are that this was a potential for long-term outages, not just power outages,” Mounds said. “That’s why I was so frustrated with the lack of communication between Eversource and the local municipalities and DOT.”
UI estimated service would be restored to the majority of its customers by midnight Aug. 8. By the afternoon hours of Aug. 6, power had been returned to roughly 40 percent of UI customers, as 580 crew members worked, awaiting reinforcements from outside contractors.
Crews from Canada, Michigan and Massachusetts arrived to aid Eversource line workers, with additional manpower expected the next day. By 10 a.m. Aug. 6, Eversource had restored power to roughly 332,000 customers, though that represented just 38 percent of the total outages caused by the storm.
Later in the day, Eversource released an estimate that restoration efforts would be “substantially complete” by midnight Aug. 11.
Around 10 p.m. on that Thursday, President Donald J. Trump informed Lamont he’d approved the state’s request for a presidential disaster declaration.
Powering up
Power was restored to roughly 65 percent of UI customers by 4 p.m. Aug. 7. UI’s ground presence was expanded from roughly 600 to 800 crew members with the arrival of out-ofstate workers and the National Guard.
Jim Conroy, a line supervisor with Mainebased On Target Utility Services, arrived in Connecticut with his crew to aid UI’s restoration around Trumbull, after two days of work in his home state for Central Maine Power.
“The electric utilities, whether here working for UI or back home, it takes an extensive effort when there’s a storm of this magnitude,” Conroy said.
Out-of-state Eversource crew members also arrived, growing the company’s available resources to 1,189 crews. The company said power at this point had been restored to roughly 57 percent of customers.
By Aug. 8, Eversource reported that more than 1,700 crews had restored power to about 70 percent of customers. The total number of customers who lost power, according to the company, eclipsed 1 million between Eversource and the smaller United Illuminating.
Satellite command centers were set up in six hard-hit areas: Berlin, Cheshire, Madison, Norwalk, Tolland, and Torrington.
Eversource reported 50 miles of downed wire, more than 1,000 broken utility poles, 400 damaged transformers, 4,300 downed trees and more than 1,200 blocked roads. Restoration after a Level 3 storm, according to Hallstrom, would normally take 5 to 10 days.
In Bethel, power was restored to about 2,000 homes on Aug. 8, but Knickerbocker said those restorations came while some roads were still blocked by downed wires.
“I just thank God that the town of Bethel did not have a serious fire behind one of those trees, because (the home) would have burned to the ground,” the first selectman said. “They put life safety in the backseat in order to get their outage numbers down.”
As UI expanded its team to about 1,050 crew members, the company restored power to roughly 93 percent of its customers by 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 9.
Heavy manpower on the weekend
In Danbury, Blasi reached out to Hearst Connecticut Media as her power remained out and her road was still blocked. The next day, crews removed the downed tree and wiring.
“I gotta say, as soon as that story hit, it seemed like it motivated Eversource and the city to do something right away,” Blasi said.
A few days later, she was interviewed on television. A short time later, Blasi’s power was finally restored.
But even as power was restored, many customers complained their internet and cell service remained down. At the time, telecommunications companies including Optimum, Comcast and Frontier pointed to the power companies needing to restore the outages before their crews could fix the cable wires.
While Eversource and UI each provided day-by-day breakdowns of their preparation and response to the storm, affected telecommunications companies offered less specific information.
Optimum did not respond to a request for comment about its response to the outages, while Comcast and Frontier officials provided general statements about how they mobilized and increased staffing in Connecticut.
The power companies continued to increase their own manpower to do their part in the process.
Eversource reported more than 2,300 line, tree and support crews on the ground working to restore power to 138,000 Connecticut customers who remained in the dark on Aug. 9. The company estimated 90 percent of customers would be back online that night.
“Eversource immediately assembled a massive response to address both customer outages and community priorities, which was made possible only as a result of the company’s advanced preparation and planning,” Hallstrom said. “Power was restored more quickly than any prior storm, despite the greater level of damage than expected.”
A UI spokesman said the company had restored 99 percent of all outages by Aug. 10 and was expanding its response team to more than 1,120 crew members to address the remainder of the issues.
In Eversource territory, 75,000 customers remained without power nearly a week after the storm. After touring storm-damaged areas in Bristol and Cheshire, Lamont said utility companies should consider offering customers refunds and regulators to adopt performance-based regulation, “in particular, when it comes to reliability and resilience.”
“It seems to me that if you do really well, you deserve a better rate of return, and if you don’t perform, if you leave tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people without service for days on end, now we’re coming up on a week, there should be penalties to pay,” Lamont said on Aug. 10.
A Hearst Connecticut Media Group investigation revealed the state’s electric companies — despite widespread criticism and investigations over slow power restoration a decade ago — have been steadily reducing their workforce while earnings rose.
One week later
A week after the storm, Eversource reported 26,000 still without power on Aug. 11, but said it was on track to hit its midnight “substantially complete” deadline.
UI reported fewer than 50 scattered outages that day due to issues affecting individual customers.
“As with every storm, we planned in advance and marshaled significant restoration resources ahead of its arrival,” Tony Marone, UI’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “As part of this plan, approximately 25 percent of our resources were dedicated to our municipalities to clear roads and remove damaged infrastructure to establish site safety. This partnership was essential to the recovery of our communities.”
By Aug. 12, UI restored all of its outages associated with the storm. According to UI, 123,700 of its 337,000 customers had been affected.
Eversource reported power had been restored that day to 99 percent of its customers, with less than 1,000 outages remaining.
Hallstrom said the total damage to the electric system from Isaias, as measured by damage locations, exceeded both Sandy and Irene. Restoration, however, was days quicker in the aftermath of Isaias.
“Although the restoration effort was completed in record time, Eversource is acutely aware of the frustration of customers who had to endure several hot summer days and other discomfort before their power was restored,” Hallstrom said. “In addition, this storm restoration played out under the shadow of COVID-19, with customers working from home under stressful circumstances, and deeply concerned about the health and safety of their loved ones. This situation clearly hit customers hard and Eversource made every effort possible to restore power to customers as quickly and safely as possible to alleviate this unexpected sequence of events.”
Despite what the utility companies said was their best efforts, public officials were still critical. Blumenthal and Attorney General William Tong called for compensation payments to customers and the legislature scheduled hearings.
In Bethel, where power wasn’t fully restored until Aug. 14, Knickerbocker said there’s plenty of room for improvement.
“I’m personally offended by the press reports that I’m seeing from Eversource patting themselves on the back about how fast their recovery was,” Knickerbocker said, echoing almost exactly the words of Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton.
In Bridgeport, Mayor Joe Ganim threatened UI with legal action due to what he said was an inadequate response.
The long tail of damage
In municipalities across the state, debris still litters roadsides as crews work to pick it up, an indication of the widespread damage wrought by the storm.
In Stratford, for example, public works employees have endured 13-hour days for more than two weeks and didn’t anticipate finishing until at least this weekend, which didn’t include pickup of large debris requiring payloaders.
In Westport, Marpe said the debris from Isaias — some 16,000 cubic yards — is enough to fill a parking lot 10 feet high.
Albert Pizzirusso, owner of A&S Fine Foods, said his Westport location was without power for six days following the storm, forcing the store to throw out much of its supplies. Like many small business owners, Pizzirusso has already been struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He’s now talking with his insurance company about being compensated for lost product, rent and payroll.
If the insurance company doesn’t come through, he said he’s contemplating seeking damages from Eversource. “Since March, business has been off dramatically because of COVID,” Pizzirusso said. “There’s been no catering and now this.”
The power to his Post Road store was restored on Aug. 9, and after days of preparation, Pizzirusso said he reopened on Aug. 12.