BOSTON – Utility crews raced Saturday to restore power to tens of thousands of customers across New England and New York after a powerful storm dumped 2 feet of snow in some places.
More than 160,000 customers in New England were in the dark as of the afternoon and another 20,000 were without power in New York as heavy snow brought tree limbs onto power lines, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages across the country.
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Restoration efforts were complicated by snow still falling in some places, making travel dangerous. Doug Foley, Eversource president of electric operations in New Hampshire, said snow-covered roads were making it tough for workers to reach communities in order to assess damage and make repairs.
"We are still taking on system damage in parts of the state where heavy, wet snow continues to fall, and hundreds of additional crews are coming to New Hampshire to support our restoration effort,” Foley said in an emailed statement.
As of Saturday afternoon, Eversource had restored power to nearly 61,000 customers in New Hampshire since the beginning of the storm, but another 40,000 remained without power, according to the utility.
Green Mountain Power, which serves customers in Vermont, said more outages were possible there with temperatures not expected to warm up enough in the next couple of days to melt the snow.
"Clearing downed trees to get to outage locations has been slow and difficult,” Mike Burke, the utility company's vice president of field operations, said in a statement.
More than 2 feet of snow was recorded in parts of Vermont and western New York, and many communities across the region saw more than a foot, according to the National Weather Service.