Power Won't Be Back Until Saturday In Parts Of Massachusetts

MASSACHUSETTS — Many of the more than 65,000 still without power in Massachusetts could remain that way into the weekend. Eversource and National Grid both said Thursday night that restorations won't be complete until Saturday.

National Grid said there is a "global [estimated time of restoration]" of 11 p.m. Saturday that would see 95 percent of customers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have power back. Eversource said communities on the South Shore and Cape Cod will have power back by 8 p.m. Saturday.

Tens of thousands of others will have power restored over the next 24 hours. Eversource said power should be "substantially restored" in the Boston area and Southeastern Mass., the South Coast and Martha's Vineyard by midnight Thursday.

Western Mass. communities can expect power back by 8 p.m. Friday, Eversource said. MetroWest communities are looking at midnight Friday.

The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency reported 67,108 homes and businesses across Massachusetts are in the dark as of 9:30 a.m. Friday. Cohasset and Plymouth have more than 80 percent of customers without power, totaling nearly 10,000 customers.

The number of outages hit 230,000 Thursday morning. Restorations were slow to get going in the afternoon. Utility crews had to wait for wind gusts of 40-60 miles per hour to die down before continuing work.

"We're currently undertaking restoration work where safe, though in some areas, high winds are preventing crews from getting started," National Grid tweeted in the afternoon.

The overnight storm blew power for half a million people in New England.

Wind gusts of up to 90 miles per hour were recorded overnight on Cape Cod, while gusts in the 70s and 80s blew up and down the coast. Even communities far inland — including several in Western Massachusetts — were among those completely lost power. Five towns still had between 80 and 100 percent of its customers by 3:30, including Scituate, which has 7,409 outages, and Essex, which has 2,012 outages — or 98 percent of the town.

More than 50 school districts canceled or delayed class Thursday morning in cities and towns that were rocked by the nor'easter, and commuters had trouble getting to work due to blocked roads and a severely delayed commuter rail.

Wind gusts were as strong as 90 mph in Provincetown and 70 mph at Logan Airport, where an empty plane was actually nudged into a gate by the wind.

Police across Massachusetts were inundated with storm damage calls. Trees fell across roads and, in some instances, crushed cars and struck homes. No injuries have been reported. Power lines were downed across the state.

"We're responding to storm damage call to call as they come in," Melrose police told Patch Thursday.

The North Shore saw widespread damage. Plymouth County was also among those hardest-hit.

Schools were canceled or delayed due to blocked roads and downed power lines. It's the sort of thing you see after a winter nor'easter, not a fall one. Police in most communities spent the overnight and early-morning hours responding to dozens of calls.

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In Danvers, an uprooted tree crushed a car and crashed into a home. In Boston, a sailboat was thrown ashore by the storm. And in Falmouth, the coastal winds were so strong that the town needed to bring in bulldozers to clear the roads of sand.

There were severe morning delays across the commuter rail system "as our crews work aggressively to repair the damages caused by the storm early this morning." Those issues have largely been resolved, but delays lasted into the late morning.