Share
MADISON – About 650 households were impacted from the torrential storm Sunday with some homes losing powers for several hours, according to officials.
“Most of it was for a very limited time,” First Selectwoman Peggy Lyons said. “A few were up to two hours. The total for the state was closer to 8,000.”
Al Lara, a spokesperson for Eversource said the largest outage he saw at a given moment in the area was over 700 at about 11 a.m. in Killingworth.
“This was a rainstorm that sat over the area,” he said. “As soon as we made one repair, we moved up the street to another. Fuses on lines that automatically disconnect to protect the rest of the distribution from a surge.”
Disruptions ranged from momentary outages to hours-long events, Lara said.
“Throughout the day, we were getting repeated wire down calls,” he said. “Most of them relatively small, affecting one household or under 100 households, related strictly to the heavy rainfall.”
The rainfall, coming down at two to four inches an hour, he said, resulted in damage to trees, causing limbs to fall on power lines causing outages, and sometimes trees getting waterlogged and uprooted.
“The ground can take a considerable amount of rain, but some of these rainfalls at more than two inches an hour, the ground turns to mud and the trees come up,” he said. “It took awhile for crews to get in and restore power,” he said.
One of the larger incidents, he said, happened in Madison when a large tree fell, taking down a pole on Twin Bridge Road.
“That was reported around 2:30 p.m.,” he said, and power was restored within a couple hours.
Lara said that around 5 p.m. three spans of wire came down in Killingworth on Bunker Hill Road affecting both Killingworth and Madison.
“Three different utility poles were affected,” he said, and power wasn’t restored there until 3:44 this morning.
This was a rainstorm that sat over the area. As soon as we made one repair, we moved up the street to another. Fuses on lines that automatically disconnect to protect the rest of the distribution from a surge.
People on the Madison, CT Facebook page started sharing their outages at 10:19 a.m. with an outage on Dorset Lane that took nearly two hours to restore, and outages on Devonshire Road and Cross Road, and brownouts on North Summer Hill.
Guilford First Selectman Matthew Hoey said his town, which neighbors Madison, wasn’t hit too hard.
“I don’t think it was extensive here,” Guilford First Selectman Matthew Hoey said, “but we got hit pretty good relative to our beaches with debris…that kind of stuff. I haven’t heard anything substantial. If there’s significant outages, our emergency management team will alert me. We did not have to open up the emergency operations center. My suspicion was it was a non-event relative to some of the previous storms.”