With about a third of the city still without power Wednesday night, Shelton officials decided to open an overnight shelter at the Community Center at 41 Church St.
The shelter will be open from 8 p.m. Wednesday until at least 8 a.m. Thursday, according to Fire Marshal James Tortora.
Officials will decide Thursday whether to extend hours based on how much of the city is still without power.
As of 7 p.m. Wednesday, United Illuminating reported on its website that 6,875 customers in the city were without power, about 39.43 percent.
The outage number dropped by another 1,445 customers by 8:44 p.m. — forward progress.
At noon Wednesday, 7,002 outages were reported.
With restoration crews yet to arrive in Shelton, residents could be in for a long wait and EOC officials have backed off the two-day to full restoration estimate they mentioned Tuesday.
“There’s still some streets with wires on them,” Tortora said inside the Emergency Operations Center at City Hall about 6 p.m. “Presently the city is still out with UI, still clearing some trees, untangling some wires, and they’ll be back again at it tomorrow.”
“The problem now is we’re waiting for a restoration crew from UI to come up and start reconnecting everybody,” he added. “Hopefully (they’ll be here) tomorrow morning.”
Ken Bouchard, a United Illuminating liaison to the city’s emergency management team, said restoration estimates wouldn’t be available until a Thursday morning news conference with company officials and Gov. Dannel Malloy.
He said he understood the frustrations of residents but hoped they could be patient.
“It’s very frustrating,” Bouchard said. “And last time was the same thing, during the snowstorm (October 2011). We try to do the best we can. There was a lot more preparation this time around, but you can only do so much.”
Bouchard said restoration crews will focus first on “town priorities” like firehouses and school buildings before moving on to restoring lines that will get the most people back online the soonest.
“There’s a certain method to the madness,” Bouchard said. “They work on the circuits, the main trunk line circuits that will get the most people on fastest.”
“Booth Hill School, that’s still out,” he added. “They’re going to be probably focusing on that and the main trunk lines, which will get the most people in.”
Fixing those main lines will hopefully take care of the bulk of those without power, Bouchard said, but he said officials have hundreds of reports of outages affecting smaller numbers of people.
“We’ve got 40 pages with 10 on each page of onesies and twosies, house services and stuff,” he said.
UI only owns and maintains the service wires and connectors going to a house, he said, so in cases where the storm damaged a home’s electrical system, the restoration wait will be longer.
“A lot of those require a private electrician to come out,” he said. “They could be two weeks. It depends when they could get an electrician.”
Click here for a “What’s Ours. What’s Yours” graphic from UI’s Website.
In those cases, Bouchard said, UI will make sure the connection is safe until homeowners get repairs done, and then reconnect them to the grid.
“If it isn’t repaired on the house, we’ll disconnect the line, drop it on the ground and clear it, and roll it up in a coil and put it by the side of the road and disconnect it from our power,” he said. “And then when they get their end fixed, we come back in and connect it.”
