The continued cold weather has kept ice on trees, causing new outages to occur even while Green Mountain Power and Vermont Electric Cooperative make progress restoring power throughout its service territory, the company said Monday.
Green Mountain Power crews and contract line workers and tree trimmers are working diligently at restoring power to the thousands of customers who have lost power as a result of the extended ice storm. As of 4:30 p.m. Monday, 1,000 customers were without power, while more than 33,000 customers have been restored.
More than five hundred utility workers have joined VEC line workers and operations personnel to repair unprecedented damage to power lines and utility poles. The ice storm that began on Saturday continues to plague northern Vermont with a dangerous combination of precipitation and sub-freezing temperatures. Tree limbs and power lines are snapping and sagging under the weight of a thick layer of ice.
While nearly 25,000 power outages have been restored, 6,800 VEC members were still without power at 4:30 p.m. on Monday. Weather conditions had worsened and frigid temperatures were expected for the next few days which will make restoration efforts difficult, and additional outages are likely. VEC expects that about 2,500 members are likely to be without power through Christmas Day and possibly longer.
Areas in the VEC service territory that were hardest hit include Franklin County, Chittenden County, Lamoille County and the Northeast Kingdom.
‘GMP crews and the hundreds of out-of-state crews brought in for this event are very busy keeping up with outages that continue more than a day after the storm started,’ said Dorothy Schnure, GMP’s corporate spokesperson. ‘Weather forecasts had suggested that the weather would warm up and we would see ice released from the trees, which would decrease the number of new outages. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, so outages continue to climb as tree limbs laden with ice fall onto power lines.’
As of 9 am Monday, 32,000 customers have been affected by the storm. Green Mountain Power has restored power to 29,000 customers since the storm began Saturday evening, however, with new outages occurring, those numbers may change frequently. Of the 3,000 currently out, at least half are outages that occurred this morning.
‘Crews worked through the night where they could safely restore power, and now we have fresh crews working in all areas. Other crews are staged at locations where we expect additional outages to occur so that they can respond quickly,’ said Schnure.
Green Mountain Power says that with the ice on lines, some customers may experience multiple outages during the restoration period. Customers should report any new outages to GMP.
Customers may report outages by calling 1-888-835-46721-888-835-4672>