HARTFORD, Connecticut: Tens of thousands in the chilly Northeast of America spent another day without lights or heat, lingering at shopping malls, hitting the movies or bunking at friends' homes as they faced the possibility of another day without power. Actually Northwest folks remained without power for eight days after a rare October snowstorm knocked much of the region into the dark.The storm, which hit on October 29 and 30, hammered the Northeast and cut electricity to more than three million homes and businesses throughout the region. Many communities postponed trick-or-treating for youngsters.
At a news conference on Sunday night in hardest-hit Connecticut, the state's largest utility announced that it wouldn't meet its goal of restoring power to 99 per cent of its 1.2 million customers.- Jeffrey Butler (right photo), chief operating officer for Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P), apologised, saying that about 88,000 customers still remained without electricity and that it would probably be Wednesday before everyone had power restored. About 6,000 of the outages were new and unrelated to the freak October snowstorm that cut power to 800,000 Connecticut residents, he said.
New Jersey and Massachusetts each had about 4,000 customers still waiting for the lights to come back on, and utilities there expected to have power restored by midnight. Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy has launched an independent investigation of the utility companies' response amid a torrent of complaints, including a local fire department that said CL&P jeopardised safety by not quickly clearing roads of downed power lines and tree limbs.
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