National Grid Says Power Will Be Fully Restored By 8 AM Friday

NORTH ANDOVER, MA -- National Grid was on pace to meet or beat its estimate of restoring power by 11:45 pm on Thursday night for all f its customers in the towns hit hardest by this week's wind storm. By 5:30 am Thursday, there were fewer than 5 customers in both North Andover and Tewksbury waiting for power to be restored. In Andover, there were 13 customers still without power.

National Grid said it has had 800 crews working nonstop this week, but that is little consolation for the customers who waited well into Thursday for power, more than three days after first reporting power outages.

"The damage from this severe storm has been one of the most disruptive in recent history, challenging our restoration efforts and the patience of our customers. There were many cases of downed trees – not just limbs – causing broken poles and downed wires. Reconstruction work continues, along with the labor-intensive process of cleaning up tree damage, setting new poles, and repairing wires down," National Grid said on its Website.

At the worst point, nearly all of North Andover and more than 80 percent of Andover's National Grid customers were in the dark. In Andover, school was canceled on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and the town kept warming stations open from 4 am to 11 pm when temperatures threatened to dip below freezing. All three towns also postponed trick-or-treating from Tuesday night to later in the week:

• Sunday, 4-7 pm in Andover.
• Saturday, 5:30-7:30 pm in North Andover.
• Friday, 6-8 pm in Tewksbury.

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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).