Eletricidade sofre coma chegada do furacao Irene no estado de Connecticut USA
Autor: Renata Marson T. Andrade, PhD | Publicado: 2011-08-31T23:26:00-04:00

 First came the roaring winds and drenching rain, followed by devastating  floods. Now, for four straight days, darkness and disconnect.                        Related   City Room: Irene Tosses Aside a 100-Year-Old Queens Bungalow (August 31, 2011)    Storm May Cost New York $1 Billion, Cuomo Says (August 31, 2011)    River, at 100-Year High, Ravages a City That Once Thrived on It (September 1, 2011)          Related in Opinion   Room for Debate: What Did We Learn From Irene?          Connect With Us on Twitter   Follow @NYTMetro for New York breaking news and headlines.          Enlarge This Image     Michael Appleton for The New York Times Arnold Jaeger, 69, filled his generator with gas for  his home, which still does not have electricity, outside Prattsville,  N.Y.                                     One of the most frustrating and stubborn aftereffects of Tropical Storm Irene  has been the inability to restore electricity to swaths of the  Northeast, especially in Connecticut, where roughly 300,000 customers  were still without power on Wednesday night. Some whole towns in New  England were cut off, while almost every home and business in New York  City had been running on full power for days.         The slow restoration of the connections needed to heat water, run  refrigerators and recharge cellphones prompted a lot of grumbling from  elected officials and their constituents, most of it aimed at big  utility companies. And the complaints did not always find sympathy:  Connecticut Light and Power, the state's largest utility, said it might  seek to raise rates to offset the $75 million in costs it expected to  incur repairing its grid.         As the public dissatisfaction rose, so did the death toll from the  storm, which caused relentless flooding that continued to create  hazardous conditions from Vermont to Virginia. The National Guard  airlifted supplies to 13 towns in Vermont left stranded by washed-out  roads, while some residents of the Catskills region of New York  subsisted on canned spaghetti heated on outdoor grills. In Connecticut,  the start of the school year was postponed until next week while high  schools were turned into shelters and libraries into makeshift Internet  cafes.         At least 45 deaths have been attributed to the storm, including that of a  50-year-old man who was sucked into a sewer pipe on Wednesday while  trying to drain his property in Lawrence Township, N.J.         Fixing broken lines was complicated by a lack of repair crews, and in  some places, flooding. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said water had  seeped into about 40 percent of the homes in Lincoln Park, Passaic  County, and he repeated his demand that President Obama declare the  state a disaster area. Earlier in the day, the president declared  several flood-ravaged counties in upstate New York a "major disaster."          Though all of New Jersey's rivers had finally crested, Mr. Christie said  several, including the Passaic River, would quite likely remain at  dangerously high levels for another day or two. Because of damage to  water treatment facilities, more than a dozen municipalities continued  to ask their residents to boil water. Meanwhile, some 10,000 residents,  mostly from Morris and Passaic Counties, remained evacuated from flooded  neighborhoods, and 765 people stayed in 16 shelters.         "We're clearly not out of the woods yet," said Mr. Christie, who saw  some of the worst-hit areas with Janet Napolitano, the federal secretary  of homeland security, and W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of the  Federal Emergency Management Agency.         In New Jersey, about 20 percent of those who lost electricity, or  179,000 customers, still had none. In New York, about 287,000 customers  had no power, more than half of them on Long Island. All told, more than  one million homes and businesses on the East Coast were still waiting  for electricity to be restored.         For many of those without power, the main complaint was a lack of solid  information about how long their plight would last. Some said they would  rather hear that the electricity would be off for a week than to be  left wondering.         To allay some of that confusion, elected officials took to dragging  utility executives before the television cameras to answer questions.  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut brought top executives of the  state's two main power providers along to a news conference on Tuesday  evening. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo took the same tack on Wednesday, insisting  that Mark S. Lynch, the president of New York State Electrical and Gas,  make public appearances in areas without electrical service.         Officials in the Cuomo administration have been frustrated by the  difficulty they have encountered in getting some utilities to  communicate, according to one official who was not authorized to speak  publicly. When one of Mr. Cuomo's advisers called the state's utilities  to press them to prepare for the cleanup, he had to track down a senior  executive of National Grid in Europe, the official said. The company,  which owns utilities in New York, has its headquarters in England.                          Related   City Room: Irene Tosses Aside a 100-Year-Old Queens Bungalow (August 31, 2011)    Storm May Cost New York $1 Billion, Cuomo Says (August 31, 2011)    River, at 100-Year High, Ravages a City That Once Thrived on It (September 1, 2011)          Related in Opinion   Room for Debate: What Did We Learn From Irene?          Connect With Us on Twitter   Follow @NYTMetro for New York breaking news and headlines.           Her neighbor Janine Soule, 40, chimed in: "Another thing that's  bothering a lot of people is that we have no phones. I can't get in  touch with my mom; I can't get in touch with anybody."         Ms. Napolitano accompanied Mr. Cuomo on a tour of Prattsville on  Wednesday; the governor characterized the town as the hardest hit in the  state.         In Easton, Conn., Lina Siciliano, 62, said the protracted loss of power,  supplied by United Illuminating Company, was much more than an  inconvenience.         "I don't know what to say, I'm so upset," said Ms. Siciliano, whose  father and injured mother came to stay with her after losing power at  their home in upstate New York. "I have two 84-year-old people in the  house. All my insulin went bad. All the food in the refrigerator and  freezer went bad."         Ms. Siciliano said she had called the utility six times. "I couldn't get  through," she said. The municipal workers cutting trees opposite her  house told her she might have to wait another four or five days. She  said her patience would run out before then.         "People just didn't feel that the utility companies' actions matched  what they had been told," United States Representative Joe Courtney said  after surveying the damage in his district in eastern Connecticut. "The  execution just wasn't there. That's pretty darn frustrating."         Mr. Courtney said he and Governor Malloy had just met with residents of  several towns where most of the homes have not had their power restored.  In North Stonington, which was completely dark, Mr. Courtney said they  were told no repair crews had shown up yet.         Jeff Butler, the president of Connecticut Light and Power, said the  company would have 1,200 crews on the job by Friday, 400 of them to  clear trees and branches and 800 to repair fallen and tangled overhead  lines. Most of those crews were called in from other states. Some crews  came from as far away as British Columbia.         Securing enough help was complicated by the size of the storm, Mr.  Courtney said. About 100 of the crews that the utility had requested  from Quebec were en route to Connecticut when they were recalled to  repair the damage that the storm did there, he explained.         Despite the scope of the restoration project it faced, the utility was  no longer receiving a break from many of its customers by Wednesday  afternoon. In the emergency operations center in Ridgefield, a town  constable, Tom Belote, absorbed some residents' wrath. Even his wife had  complained, he said, about the town's decision to cut off all power  after the storm knocked out electricity to more than 90 percent of the  homes on Sunday.         Mr. Belote's house was in one of the few neighborhoods that had been  spared. But it too went dark after town officials agreed with the  utility that it would be best to eliminate the risks of electrocution  while crews worked to restore the power.         "After four days of answering phone calls from my neighbors, I can say a  number of people were frustrated," Mr. Belote said. "For some of them, I  tell them my tale of woe and it seems to work. For others, I just take  the verbal abuse. I'm used to it."         Mr. Butler, the utility executive, did not assuage the rising ire when  he said on Wednesday that the company would explore ways to recoup the  costs of restoration from its customers. Utilities are allowed to do  that, but given customers' anger, nobody was in the mood to consider  that possibility.        « Previous Page  1  2 	 Reporting was contributed by Sam Dolnick from Paterson, N.J.; Kristin  Hussey and Robert Davey from Connecticut; Thomas Kaplan from New York;  Noah Rosenberg from Prattsville, N.Y.; and Dirk Van Susteren from  Calais, Vt. 	 	     	  				     A version of this article appeared in print on  September 1, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:  Days After the Storm, Many Are Still in the Dark.