CL&P Struggling to Meet Sunday Deadline

Time appears to be running out for Connecticut Light & Power to meet its self-imposed deadline of 99 percent customer restoration by midnight Sunday, as the utility was still reporting more than 120,000 customers without power shortly after midnight Saturday. 

CL&P released a statement late Saturday night stating that the company had more than 2,200 line and tree crews working to restore power throughout the state, the largest amount of crews involved in restoration work in Connecticut history, and that the company was still pushing to meet its Sunday midnight deadline.

"We now have more people involved in this restoration work than with any storm in Connecticut's history and the pace is actually ahead of what was accomplished following Tropical Storm Irene," CL&P President Jeff Butler said in the statement. "We are not letting up on our goal to get 99 percent of all customers back on by Sunday night." 

But at a press conference earlier Saturday evening at the State Armory in Hartford, Butler appeared to offer his weakest public assertions yet that the utility could meet the deadline. More than 881,000 CL&P customers lost power as a result of the storm, and the utility would have to severly step up its restoration efforts on Sunday to meet that goal based on its current rate of power restoration through last weekend. 

During the same press conference, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said that he was growing "increasingly skeptical" in CL&P's ability to meet its deadline. 

Click here to see CL&P's full outage map. 

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