To our Daily Digger readers:
This story from November 2023 accidentally appeared in our newsletter on Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024. Our apologies! We meant to send you to this story we published on Wednesday about a winter storm that peaked the night prior with fierce wind gusts approaching 70 mph in some places.
Over 6,000 Vermonters remained without electrical power Tuesday morning after a storm early Monday caused over 30,000 outages across the state, according to data from VTOutages.org, a website that tracks power outages in Vermont.
Remaining outages on Tuesday have centered on Washington, Orange and Caledonia counties, where Washington Electric Cooperative is still working to repair power lines.
As of noon on Tuesday, nearly 4,500 Vermonters still remained without power, over 3,200 of them Washington Electric customers, according to VTOutages.org.
“We have close to 200 separate outage events going on right now,” said Dave Kresock, director of operations at Washington Electric.
“A lot of our territory was hit pretty hard by the storm, so it’s not like we have one big outage where we can turn a couple thousand people back on at once. It takes time for us to get across all of our territory,” he said.
Washington County received an average of over 8 inches of snow in Monday’s storm. Caledonia and Orange counties both received over 6 inches on average, according to data provided by the National Weather Service.
Washington Electric crew members worked overnight to restore electrical power to the more than 6,000 of their customers that were affected by Monday’s storm, according to an update on the utility’s website.
However, by early Tuesday morning nearly 5,000 of those customers were still without electricity.
Kresock said Washington Electric had nearly 20 crews actively working on repairing lines on Tuesday and he hoped most customers would have power back on by the end of the day.
Meanwhile, other utility companies have largely restored electricity to customers who lost power following the storm. By Tuesday at noon, Green Mountain Power had restored service to all but about 600 of its more than 20,000 customers who initially lost power.
Likewise, more than 9,000 Vermont Electric Cooperative customers lost power Monday; by noon Tuesday, that number was down to just over 300 customers.