On Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:33:35 -0600, Jim Yanik wrote:

"Pete C." wrote in
s.com:


My mother's place in CT went 7+ days without utility power. I got up
there Tuesday evening, cleared the trees from the driveway and got the
generator going. Spent the next couple days removing more trees /
branches and patching two holes in the roof where big branches hit.
About 10pm Sat evening a crew from MO was by and repaired the damaged
drop (snapped neutral), and a few hours later they had repaired enough
along the street to get power back on. All in all one of the nastier CT
storms in my 41 years of experience, but there have been similar in the
past so it's certainly not unprecedented.


Here in Florida,utilities trim trees away from power lines well before
hurricane season begins. Preparedness.

did Northeast utilities NOT expect winter storms to bring down tree
branches and down power lines?
After all,this was just an early storm. tree branches would have caused
troubles anyways,just later on.

No, it wasn't "just an early storm". Significant snow storms early enough to
have the trees still in full leaf are fairly rare. Once the leaves are off
the trees they're fine for 10x the storm; nothing to stick to.

BTW,I went without power for 7 days in Aug 2004,after Hurricane Charlie.
(in steamy Florida,90+ temps and humidity every day.

That's a little different than being without power when it's below freezing.
BTDT.

Other buildings in my apartment complex were without power for 30 days,they
had a meter panel short out from water blown into it.

Yes, when I lived in NY we had a foot of wet, sloppy, snow on Oct 4 (my son's
9th birthday). We were without power for three days. Some, living in less
populated areas were without for a month. Several years later a three-day ice
storm in VT caused widespread outages, for some, weeks. We lived just high
enough (100' mattered) that it melted during the day so didn't build up. We
were *very* lucky to escape without interruption that time.