FUCK YOU CONNECTICUT LIGHT AND POWER
They have fucked this whole situation up. There are still about 200,000 people who don't have power a week after the storm. I went six days, which is ridiculous.
Connecticut has two major electrical companies, CL&P and United Illuminating (UI). CL&P runs about 3/4 of the state, the rest is UI or independent companies. UI had their area complete in about 3 days then started sending crews to help CL&P, we also had contractors from all over the country. The company working on our road was from Florida. I've seen trucks from Alabama, Indiana, Florida, Montana and South Carolina (I guess to work here your state has to end in an 'a'). Most of the time you saw these trucks they were idle. Why? Because CL&P didn't give them any direction for almost 2 days! The pole that fell near my house laid in the road for 3 days, then a crew came and tipped it the other way so it was laying on the grass in front of Southington High instead of across Flanders Road. It took another two days for a crew to put the pole back up and fix any wire issues. In that time, we saw at least six trucks from Florida just sitting in the High School parking lot.
News stations were reporting that CL&P had called the trucks up but gave them no direction as to where to begin or what to do.
In Meriden a giant tree fell on Colony Rd (a main road) and tore down two power poles with it. The road was closed for five days before work even began to fix it. I still don't think it is complete.
The northwest corner of CT is all rural and has small towns and villages with populations under 5,000 people, it remained 100% dark for four days. Four days before work even began to fix anything! No food, no heat, no gas. Nothing up there for 4 days.
Wallingford has it's own electrical plant, therefore they could fix their own repairs very quickly, they had no one to worry about but Wallingford's few outages. Therefore, guess what happened in Wallingford? A complete state bottleneck.
Gas stations were running out of gas daily, the lines at Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds were 45-60 mins long. Lines of cars down main roads to get into a gas station, people coming from all over the state for any shot at getting some food and gas. Towns that had partial outage were even worse, parts of the Berlin Turnpike (a major commercial boulevard running from Meriden to Wethersfield) did have power and became flooded with people worse than Wallingford. I should really post a picture of a map here, for out of staters to understand where people were traveling.
That's better.
I know it is a small state but it was hectic. A major town like West Hartford was 90% dark for five days. While at karate class on Wednesday a parent from Cheshire was telling us he saw 3 CLP trucks on his street and he watched them while they took an hour and a half lunch break. Just hanging out, sitting around, no problem, like nothing that important was really going on.
Well, that's my rant. I'm glad to be back to business and am looking forward to actually cooking food in my house for the first time this week! That was the worst part, we have an electric stove so every meal we ate had to be out, that costs a lot of money. I guess you can put in a claim with FEMA for money spent on replacing all the food in the refrigerator that was ruined. I haven't seen any info on how to do this but I will look into it.
If I lived in that state, I think that I might invest in a generator and solar panels.
ReplyDeleteThe area on south colony is still down, now on Saturday one week after the storm. All they did in those 7 days was to move the debris out of the road and off to the side. No power on Old Colony Rd (South Colony once it crosses Hall) and of course no traffic light on the corner of Hall and South Colony. South Broad St still out just south of Gray's house (he got his power back last night) and the lights at Broad St and Gypsy Lane as well as the lights in front of Townline Plaza still out with traffic all blocked up.
ReplyDeleteIt was totally ridiculous.