HARDWICK – Hardwick Electric Department’s (HED) line crew worked overtime to restore power after the storm on December 23 through December 24. Heavy rain and high winds destroyed trees, ripped off roofs, broke poles and tore wires down across the system.
HED’s team started working at 6 a.m. on the morning of Friday, Dec. 23, with over 2,000 customers (nearly half of its customers) without power and worked in increasingly cold and windy weather for 18.5 hours until 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 24, reducing the 2,000 outages to about 500.
On average, power was restored to more than 80 customers per hour in a service territory that covers 174 square miles. After a few hours of sleep, the team was back restoring power at 6 a.m., on December 24 and working until 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, when the number of customers without power was reduced from 500 to 58. By the evening of Christmas day, power was restored to all customers except for 11 vacant seasonal homes, for which power was restored in daylight on Monday morning, December 26.
