Utilities Are Doing What They Can to Get Everyone Back Online

Good news is on the way if you’re a National Grid customer in New Hampshire.

Company spokesman David Graves says most households in the state should soon have power.

We have approximately 820 customers who are still without service. The majority of them are in Salem and Pelham. Actually we’ve been able to restore more than 96 percent , more than 24,000 who were knocked out because of the storm of last week.

Officials at Public Service of New Hampshire, or PSNH say the outage is still affecting more than 64,000 households.

That’s down from more than 300,000 homes last week.

Allison McLean of PSNH says most of the remaining outages are in the Monadnock Region.

In the new Ipswich area we’re still looking at you know 2, 3 days possibly out on some of those areas. Peterborough is coming back online in sections.

McLean says the utility could make significant progress by the end of the week.

We’re looking at trying to bring at least 95% of all of our customers by Friday. And then certainly there’s going to be unique and individual circumstances that we’re dealing with throughout the weekend.

Unitil officials say they’ve got roughly 6400 customers still without power.

Spokesperson Stephanye Schuyler says the area in and around Concord is less of a worry than the company’s territory on the seacoast.

I mean we’re making significant progress in capital because there’s only 204 customers at this recording…..who need to be restored versus the 6200 at the seacoast who need to be restored.

Unitil crews are aiming to get everyone back on line before the weekend, if another storm doesn’t slow them down.

Many New Hampshire Co-op customers on the Seacoast are also still without power.

The Co-op’s Seth Williams says about 3,500 households there are still off the grid.

Williams says most of them are in communities in and around Raymond.

That’s where all of our crews have been diverted to. We’ve been leaving just skeleton crews in the remainder of our districts to take care of sort of service calls there but all of our efforts now have been focused in these areas where the outage has been persisting.

Co-op officials say they hope to get most of their members back on line before the end of the week.

But the utilities say they can’t guarantee that everyone will have power this weekend, or even next week.

The only thing they can promise is that they’ll work as hard as they can to restore power for everyone.