The senior vice president of Unitil says the utility’s total outages following New Hampshire’s December ice storm were almost five times higher than the largest it had ever confronted, and it took five times the crews and work hours to fix the damage.
George Gantz says workers were pushing themselves beyond the point of exhaustion to rebuild large parts of its transmission system almost from scratch.
The storm left more than 41,000 of Unitil’s 75,000 New Hampshire customers without power some for more than a week.
Gantz said Unitil, like other regional utilities, was prepared for the storm, but its damage was beyond what was predicted. He said estimated cost to the company for rebuilding its system is $10 million.