Utilities now say power restorations will take longer than estimated

By Erin Ailworth, Globe Staff

NStar said it expects its outage restoration efforts to continue into Thursday following this weekend’s storm.

“As things progress, we’ll be able to post town-by-town estimates,” NStar spokesman Michael Durand said.

As of 5:30 p.m., the utility had 159,000 customers without power.

National Grid, meanwhile, said it expects to have power fully restored to Brockton and Quincy by mid-Monday, instead of later today. Currently, about 46,000 of its customers have no electricity.

The worst spots with the highest concentration of outages -- where 91 percent or more of the customers served by NStar had no electricity -- were in Marion, Mattapoisett, Plympton, Rochester, Scituate, and Wareham, according to the NStar’s outage map.

The nor’easter knocked out power to all of Scituate, town officials said. Downed lines could be spotted throughout town, dangling from poles and crumpled on the ground, resembling black snakes curled up in the snow. In some places, the lines rested on car roofs and driftwood.

Rick Colvin said parts of his girlfriend’s house in the First Cliff neighborhood registered 44 degrees Saturday night. But Colvin, his girlfriend, and her children muddled through with the aid of a wood-burning stove and a heap of blankets.

“Staying up all night keeping the wood stove going, up every three hours, it’s a lot of work,” he said Sunday, taking a break from shoveling snow. Colvin was trying to clear a path for the family’s Kentucky gaited horse, Chilmark.

With utility representatives predicting it would take a few more days to get power back online, Colvin added: “Thank God we have a gas stove.”

On Sunday, thousands of utility teams worked in tandem with city fire, police, and public works crews to clear roads and fix damaged portions of the utilities’ transmission and distribution systems, including repositioning poles and rehanging wires that had been knocked down by high winds and falling trees.

National Grid representatives said they expected to complete power restorations in Attleboro by the end of the day. But others still without power should expect to remain in the dark for a few more days.

“Customers in even harder hit areas -- Norwell, Scituate, Cohasset,” said Marcy Reed, president of National Grid in Massachusetts, “those outages are going to extend, as we said yesterday, into Tuesday.”

National Grid’s dark spots were concentrated mostly in Bristol, Norfolk, and Plymouth counties. More than two-thirds of the National Grid customers without electricity are in Plymouth County alone, where nearly all of Norwell remained dark, as did Scituate.

While some residents reported seeing few of the utility’s workers in their neighborhoods, Reed said the crews are definitely there, but may be working in a remote area or at a substation, might not be in branded vehicles, or are likely on some other street.

National Grid also currently has two community liaisons coordinating with officials in each town, she said.

“There are no towns where we do not have crews,” she added.