BOSTON (AP) — Emergency services raced Saturday to restore power to tens of thousands of customers in New England and New York after a powerful storm dumped two feet of snow in places.
More than 160,000 customers in New England were left in the dark as of noon and another 20,000 were without power in New York as heavy snow brought tree limbs onto power lines, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks power outages across the country.
Restoration efforts were complicated by snow that continued to fall in places, making travel dangerous. Doug Foley, Eversource president of electrical operations in New Hampshire, said snowy roads made it difficult for workers to reach communities to assess damage and make repairs.
“We are still experiencing system damage in parts of the state where heavy, sleet continues to fall, and hundreds of additional crews are coming to New Hampshire to support our recovery efforts,” Foley said in an emailed statement.
As of Saturday afternoon, Eversource had supplied power to nearly 61,000 customers in New Hampshire since the start of the storm, but another 40,000 were without power, according to the utility.
Green Mountain Power, which serves customers in Vermont, said more outages were possible there with temperatures not expected to warm enough to melt the snow in the coming days.
“Cutting downed trees to get to fault sites has been slow and difficult,” Mike Burke, the utility’s vice president of field operations, said in a statement.
More than two feet of snow fell in parts of Vermont and western New York, according to the National Weather Service, and many communities in the region saw more than a foot of snow.
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