Community Corner

Frustrations Mount As Outages Linger

Residents in several local towns are heading into their fourth night without lights.

In her job as an assistant to the first selectman in East Haddam, Linda Zemienieski is used to fielding phone calls from the occasional upset resident or those seeking information.

But these days, her role as the gatekeeper to the selectmen’s office has become something more like counselor or therapist for frustrated and anxious residents who call in regularly to find out when their power will come back and where they can get basic necessities until it does.

“People are just anxious,” she said.

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Just as she says this her phone rings again in Town Hall, she picks up, listens patiently, and then explains to a caller where they can go to get water and a hot meal.

East Haddam is one of just a few towns left in the state Wednesday afternoon that were still almost completely without power. A generator was helping to keep Town Hall offices open and Zemienieski, along with First Selectman Mark Walter, were in their second-floor offices, the town’s defacto war room.

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Now in their fourth full day without electricity, and most also without cell phone service or Internet access, residents’ nerves here are fraying. They’re anxious, Walter said, because they’re not able to connect with others in the world, and they’re getting little information about when the power will come back.

The food in the refrigerator went bad days ago, and now everything in the freezer is gone as well.

“It’s just stressing people out,” Walter said.

Middletown On The Mend

In Middletown, 13 percent of CL&P customers remained without power (2,962) as of 7:30 p.m. That's significantly down from Sunday, when the number of homes without electricity reached 47 percent (10,820).

Chery Cuddy, who lives with her teenage son in the Charton Terrace apartments on Newfield Street in Middletown, said she's been without power since 7 a.m. Sunday. Around noon on Wednesday, she was enjoying a free meal at the shelter at Middletown High School.

"It’s terrible," Cuddy said of being without power. "It’s a good thing I have a rotary phone -- otherwise I would have no phone service. It’s awful. I can’t wait to take a shower. I had to throw away $250 worth of food, all my hamburgers, all my meat in the freezer, everything in the fridge.

"A couple people told me, ‘Just go to (local food pantry) Amazing Grace,’" a frustrated Cuddy said. "Yeah, go to Amazing Grace. How do you cook? How do you microwave? How do you put milk on your cereal? Eat that stuff? It’s all perishable."

Lack Of Response

While Zemienieski is doing a great job at being compassionate and caring to those who call in, Walter said, even he’s becoming frustrated with what he sees as a lack of response by CL&P to the town’s concerns and the dearth of information coming from the company.

He said he believes there is only one work crew in town, but no one, not even the CL&P liaison sent to work with East Haddam, could figure out where that crew was as of Wednesday morning.

On top of that, Walter said, CL&P won’t let town crews remove trees on wires, so some roads remain impassible. Around town there are several areas where large trees hang precariously on sagging power lines.

“We’re willing to do a lot of the work if they would just tell us that the lines are safe,” Walter said.

Some of the roads that are passable, he added, were cleared of debris by residents.

Merchants Powerless

A neighboring town to the south, Chester, is in a similar power predicament. Virtually the entire town remains without electricity, including Chester’s thriving business district in the village center. The center was eerily quiet Wednesday afternoon, with many of the businesses there closed.

At the Red Pepper gift and clothing store on Main Street, owner Fran Gordon had the store’s doors open Wednesday afternoon. But she said few people have come through them in the last day. There’s no power on in her store and she says they’ve done little to no business in recent days. Even the UPS deliveryman didn’t show up yesterday and the only people in the store Wednesday afternoon were reporters.

“We’re here and we have the open sign, but we’re not going to stay open.”

She lives in Chester and her home has been without power since Irene struck over the weekend. But Gordon’s trying to keep an upbeat outlook. As she talks, her husband tries to get a power-outage projection by texting the CL&P information line, but no estimate is available. “At least if we knew ...,” Gordon said. She’s hoping the power will come on soon, and thinks the power company is doing the best it can.

The downtown has city water, which is still flowing, and Gordon is grateful for that.

“At least we have water. I feel sorry for families who don’t have water.”

Across the street, Simon’s Marketplace, a popular eatery and gathering place for locals, is dark, its doors were locked and a “Closed” sign hung in the window. While a couple other stalwart business owners threw open their doors on Wednesday, most of the downtown was closed.

Across town, First Selectman Tom Englert gathered with a couple other local officials in Town Hall to talk about the ongoing relief efforts. Englert has been first selectman here for only two weeks; he took over for the former first selectman, who retired and moved away.

“This is on-the-job training at its finest,” he said.

He’s been in touch with CL&P, Englert said, but there’s no set timeframe for when the power will come back on.

In the meantime, Chester has established a shelter at a regional middle school in Deep River where residents can get three hot meals a day, a hot shower, watch television and just mingle with one another.

Englert said the shelter fulfills both important physical needs residents without power have right now, as well as an important emotional need: the ability to simply connect with one another.

“Right now they’re just staring at the same four walls. This way, they can get out and talk to other people, get a hot meal, instead of eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.”

Some Making Progress

East Hampton and Marlborough are two other towns that were also completely powerless after Irene blew through the state on Sunday. Both got limited power restoration as of late Wednesday afternoon in their main business districts, but the outlying areas of both towns remain without electricity.

In East Hampton, about 2,000 of the approximately 6,000 CL&P customers had their power restored Wednesday, leaving about 3,807 customers in the dark.

In Marlborough, 2,113 CL&P customers were without power still.

While businesses on the main commercial strip along Route 66 in East Hampton had electricity and reopened Wednesday, Stop & Shop, the town’s main grocery store, still did not have power and was running off a generator. The store had limited lights on and its seafood department was not operating.

It was also completely sold out of ice.


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