BOSTON (AP) – Hundreds of thousands of customers remain without electricity in Massachusetts on Friday and officials say it could take until late Saturday to restore power to most.
More than 150,000 customers in the state are facing their third day without power, according to online tallies from utility companies Eversource and National Grid.
The outages are concentrated mostly on the state’s South Shore and Cape Cod. In coastal towns south of Boston such as Hingham, Cohasset and Norwell, nearly 70% of residents were without power as of Friday morning.
As of 3 p.m. Friday, just under 400 customers in Rhode Island remained without power. Restorations were estimated to be completed before the end of day. A majority of remaining outages in the state were in Newport and Newport counties.
In Bristol County, Mass., just over 3,500 National Grid customers remained without power. Restoration efforts in the area were expected to be completed by Saturday evening. Roughly 1,000 Eversource customers in Bristol County, Mass. remained without power at that time as well.
Earlier on Friday, said Michael McCallan, vice president of New England electric operations for National Grid said, “As we get to repairs within individual neighborhoods, the work is more time-intensive and complex. For example, on the Massachusetts South Shore, the storm has damaged an estimated 150 poles. Our crews are working safely to repair this significant damage, but setting poles is a labor-intense process that can take up to eight hours for a single pole.”
Forecasters say more heavy rains and strong winds are on the way for the region starting Friday night into Saturday, though it won’t be nearly as powerful as this week’s nor’easter.
Winds reached as high as 94 miles an hour and some 500,000 customers lost power during the two-day storm. Some schools in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island even canceled classes Thursday as cleanup continued.
Update: Provides updated outage figures in paragraphs 4-6.
PBN contributed to this article.
