Two days after Tropical Storm Isaias swept through Massachusetts, knocking over countless trees and power lines, tens of thousands of households in the commonwealth were still reporting electrical outages Thursday afternoon.
Isaias, which barreled through much of New England on Tuesday, brought wind gusts as high as 63 miles per hour to Massachusetts and caused significant damages in numerous communities across the commonwealth, uprooting trees and knocking power lines down onto roads.
As of just after 8 a.m. on Thursday, 41,768 households in the state were without electricity, according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency’s online map, which updates data from the state’s electrical companies every 15 to 30 minutes.
National Grid was reporting the most outages of the commonwealth’s four electricity providers, with more than 30,000 of the company’s roughly 1.3 million customers.
Christine Milligan, a National Grid, spokesperson told MassLive the company expects electricity to return to the majority of its households that lost power by 7 p.m. on Thursday, though a few customers may not see their outages fixed until Friday night or even Saturday.
The utility company has deployed more than 1,800 workers to help make repairs. The damages National Grid personnel are fixing range from split utility poles that need to be replaced to entire trees that were knocked onto power lines and need to be lifted, according to Milligan.
“At the peak of the storm, 7 p.m. Tuesday night, we had nearly 190,000 customers in Massachusetts without power, and the vast majority of the remaining customers we anticipate having power back by 7 p.m. Thursday,” the spokesperson said. “The very, very last customers could receive power by Friday night or Saturday, because we’ve just seen so much widespread damage.”
She added. “We’re doing our best.”
On Tuesday, more than 250,000 residents and businesses had no power, and by Wednesday nearly 138,000 households were without electricity, the majority of which were in Western and Central Massachusetts.
Some communities, like Holland and Wales in Hampden County, saw 100% of their customers lose power over the course of the tropical storm Tuesday, according to MEMA.
The majority of the households in those two Pioneer Valley towns still had no electricity Thursday morning, MEMA’s online map showed. In Holland, roughly 82% of the community’s customers were without power, and in Wales, the estimated number was as high as 91%.
Hampden and Worcester counties continued to report the highest number of electrical outages Thursday at 23,699 and 9,497 respectively.
The city of Springfield, which was seeing the largest number of power losses Wednesday out of any Massachusetts community, was still reporting the most outages in the state Thursday.
Roughly 6% of the households in the city, around 3,930 customers, were without power, according to MEMA.
Tropical Storm Isaias hit the Springfield area around 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, blowing trees down onto homes and cars in the city and surrounding communities.
Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno issued an emergency declaration on Wednesday in response to the widespread outages and a 36-inch water main break on East Columbus Avenue and York Street.
“Many of us are not only out of power but out of water. There was no water this morning. [The water] is starting to come back across [the city] so an emergency declaration has been declared by myself very early this morning,” Sarno said at a press conference Wednesday.
A spokesperson for the utility company Eversource, which services Springfield, said its customers will receive restoration estimates specific to their outages when crews work on their repair jobs.
It is unclear when power will return for numerous households in Springfield, according to Eversource’s website.
“Our massive, around-the-clock restoration effort continues. In Western Mass we’ve restored more than 60,700 customers since the storm began,” Priscilla Ress, a company spokesperson, said. “Eversource crews are working around-the-clock to restore the remaining customer outages caused by Tropical Storm Isaias.”
The remaining repairs require that crews fix extensive damages, including broken or fallen trees as well as downed poles and power lines, according to Ress.
“This work is time-consuming, and we are working as quickly as safety allows,” she noted.
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