Eight Days After Storm, Eight Andover Customers Waiting For Power

ANDOVER, MA -- A week and a day after a wind storm left huge portions of the Merrimack Valley without power, there were still eight customers waiting for service to be restored in Andover, according to the National Grid outage map. And if those customers were checking the map at 7 am Tuesday, they would have been disappointed to see that another estimated restoration time had come and gone. It was at that time that National Grid issued a new estimate of 9 am Tuesday for full power restoration.

North Andover may have had more customers hit with multi-day outages, but the award for longest outages goes to Andover. Those eight customers were nearly half of the total number of outages National Grid was still working to address in Massachusetts Tuesday morning. The utility said there were 19 Massachusetts customers -- out of more than 1.3 million -- still without power.

"We sincerely appreciate our customers’ patience as we worked around the clock to restore service following last Sunday’s damaging wind and rain storm, one of the most disruptive in recent history," the utility said in a message posted in its Website.

The storm was particularly harsh because it took out a series of 31 transmission lines. During the first 48 hours after the Oct. 29-30th storm, most of National Grid's efforts were spent fixing those lines. It wasn't until the middle of last week that the utility was able to deploy the 800 line crews it had working around the clock into neighborhoods to restore power neighborhood by neighborhood.

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Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).