GMP restores most power by Sunday afternoon

Green Mountain Power’s preparation for the ice storm has helped it keep up with outages that ramped up this morning. As of 3:00 p.m. Sunday, crews had restored power to 13,000 customers, while 3,000 remain without power.
Vermont Electric Cooperative customers experienced the most outages. As of late Sunday afternoon, there were still over 12,000 of its customers without power. Glover was particularly hard hit, with nearly 700 still out.’
‘The ice storm affected northwestern Vermont most severely, as we expected, but we also had some outages in southern Vermont,’ said Dorothy Schnure, GMP corporate spokesperson. ‘Our strategy of keeping workers in locations across the state but focusing them in northwestern Vermont has paid off in that we have been keeping up with power restoration throughout the morning and early afternoon.
Green Mountain Power’s storm preparation included activating its workforce as well as bringing in out-of-state contract line workers and tree crews.
‘Our experience shows that having an intense response right up front is the best, most cost-effective way to restore power quickly,’ said Schnure. ‘In fact, during this event the average outage lasted only two and a half hours.’ ‘Predicting an ice storm is very difficult and we’ve prepared for the worst predictions. We’re hopeful at this point that we will be able to restore power to the vast majority of our customers by late tonight with just a few remaining out into the morning.’
As the weather warms, ice will unload from trees, often causing additional outages when the branches pop back up. As a result, Green Mountain Power is experiencing new outages, but is hopeful that they will not be extensive.
As power is restored to Green Mountain Power customers, the utility said it has released some of its crews to help other utilities in Vermont in their restoration efforts.
Customers may report outages by calling’ 1-888-835-4672, visiting GMP’s Outage Center page at’ www.greenmountainpower.com’ or mobile enhanced atm.greenmountainpower.com, or by clicking the ‘Power Out?’ button on GMP’s’ Facebook’ site.’