Top

Deadline CT

November 7, 2011 by · Comments Off on Deadline CT 

Deadline CT, Connecticut’s largest utility pushed back a self-declared deadline to restore power to 99% of its customers by midnight Sunday, more than a week after a crippling early blizzard.

“We have missed our goal, and for that I apologize to everyone,” Jeffrey Butler, the president of Connecticut Light and Power, told reporters Sunday evening in Hartford. He blamed what he called a historic storm for the delay, but admitted, “We have not met our expectations and those we set for all of you.”

Butler said 95% to 96% of its customers statewide had power, and the utility expected to reach the 99% target by midnight Monday. But 80,000-plus customers, most of them in the north-central part of the state, still had no electricity Sunday evening.

Temperatures were expected to dip into the low 30s overnight, and about 2,100 state residents spent Saturday night in shelters, Gov. Dannel Malloy said.

CL&P’s public image was already battered by the outages that followed Tropical Storm Irene in September — a double blow Butler called “the two most significant events that have ever hit the state of Connecticut in terms of power loss.”

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. Sunday, he told reporters that he had asked state Attorney General George Jepsen’s office to join the review, led by Clinton administration FEMA chief James Lee Witt.

Bottom