WILTON, Conn. If you live in Wilton and were among more than 1.2 million customers in Connecticut who lost power during Hurricane Irene, you can vent your frustration at two public hearings Monday.
In addition to a public hearing scheduled by lawmakes at 9 a.m. in the General Assembly's Public Legislative Office Building in Hartford, Wilton officials have set up a meeting a lot closer to home. A public hearing, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. at the Wilton Library, will be hosted by state Rep. Gail Lavielle and state Sen. Toni Boucher, both Wilton Republicans, and First Selectman Bill Brennan.
Representatives of Connecticut Light & Power will be at the meeting to listen to public comments and answer questions. "We want to ensure residents of Wilton have a chance to tell the electric company how they feel about being without power for five to eight days," said Lavielle. Boucher and Lavielle called quickly for a review of the "lack of preparedness and communications" during the storm.
Lavielle, who was at the legislature's first Irene hearing Monday in Hartford, said that from testimony she heard from utility company executives, "they understand the reasons for the outages such as massive tree downings." She said they also admitted to a lack of communication that kept people in the dark about when power would be restored.
But she wasn't sure they have any answers yet on how to resolve the issues. "I came away Monday feeling they know what went wrong and why but don't know how to prevent it from happening again in the future, and that is deeply troubling," Lavielle said. "The storm could have been much worse, and even with it being downgraded look at how long so many people lost power."
Lavielle said after the power companies and other officials made "carefully prepared presentations," several upstate mayors, first selectmen and other public officials expressed outrage at the length of the outages and lack of communication.
"In CL&P's 100-year history, no storm has caused as much damage or as many outages as Tropical Storm Irene," Jeff Butler, president and chief operating officer, told four legislative panels -- including the Public Safety, and Energy and Technology Committees. "The combination of wind and flooding rains left as many as 7 million customers from the Carolinas to Maine without electricity, with over 1 million of them from Connecticut.
"With widespread damage affecting all 149 cities and towns we serve, I believe CL&P's response was appropriate and strong. In nine days, we safely restored as many outages as we typically would in 11 months. For our electric system, this storm was the worst in history.
"As with any major disaster, we will all learn from examining the impacts of this storm, and we hope to work with the state and its communities to make continuous improvements. We welcome a dialogue with state and municipal leaders to discuss improvements we can all make in vegetation management, as trees created the vast majority of outages."
Similar remarks were made by representatives of United Illuminating Co., who indicated that about half of its 324,000 customers in 17 towns and cities also lost power including large numbers in Fairfield and Easton.
Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia said the pre-storm planning should have been better. "I can't be responsible for all the mistakes CL&P made," Moccia said. "That's not my call. We had great cooperation from the line people and from the emergency center. But if the powers that be didn't give them enough crews, that's beyond their call, my call."
To reach Richard Weizel, email [email protected].
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