Connecticut's largest utility company tried to reassure customers Monday that its workers are "doing everything possible" to restore power after missing a self-declared deadline to get 99% of its customers back online by midnight Sunday, more than a week after a crippling October blizzard.
"I know there's frustration out there, there's anger out there, but I can tell you the men and women working 24 hours a day to get power restored remain dedicated, committed to get this work done as quickly and safely as possible," Jeffrey Butler, the president of Connecticut Light and Power, told reporters Monday morning in Hartford.
Butler stressed that no crews would be released until all customers have power restored but warned that the company's most recent goal of 99% restored by Monday at midnight also might not be met due to the "extent and complexity of the damage in the areas hardest hit by this storm."
Approximately 61,000 customers were without power across the state, Butler said. About 44,000 of those were storm-related outages while the other 17,000 were new outages not necessarily related to the storm. Butler did not have the specifics for these outages.
Gov. Dannel Malloy spoke to reporters Monday about his decision to review utility companies after two storms battered his state over the past few months, the blizzard storm and Tropical Storm Irene.
"We will go through a very rigorous process internally to look at the things that we could have done better or should have done better just as we did with Irene," he said.
On Friday, Malloy announced that he had hired a former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief to review how CL&P and another utility, United Illuminating, dealt with the late-October blizzard that hit the Northeast.
Malloy told reporters on Sunday that he had asked state Attorney General George Jepsen's office to join the review, led by Clinton administration FEMA chief James Lee Witt. The review, which will be conducted by Witt's consulting firm, Witt Associates, is to be completed by December 1.
Malloy said Monday that the goal is to find "tangible short-term solutions to fix what is broken in terms of how power is restored to those who lose it when we have major outages."
The snowstorm killed at least 22 people around the eastern United States. Eight were reported to have died in Connecticut, half of them from carbon monoxide poisoning.
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