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Assessing Damage and Restoring Power

When your power goes out, we begin our restoration effort as early as safety allows. 

Eversource assessing storm damage

We send damage assessors to sites of reported outages to assess how much work needs to be done. This information is critical in determining how long it will take to restore your power.

If an Eversource vehicle comes to your neighborhood and then leaves again, there’s a good chance it’s a damage assessor. Assessors don’t make repairs, but they help the people who do.

Eversource lineworker in a bucket truck

We have established priorities that we apply during storm restoration. We may work on jobs from more than one category at the same time.

Our response is generally prioritized following these guidelines:

  1. Public safety calls are first priority, including police and fire life safety calls, Level 1 E-911 calls and life-threatening situations
  2. Clearing blocked roads of electrical hazards comes next
  3. Critical facilities are generally next, such as police and fire stations, hospitals, schools, and sewage and water plants. If these facilities are running on stable generator power, we may move them lower on the list
  4. Circuit backbones and lateral feeders follow. These are transmission lines and substations, followed by the larger “backbone” lines of our distribution network. We repair lines and substations based on how many customers are affected by each repair job
  5. From there, we prioritize distribution system repairs that restore the most customers as quickly as possible. Repairs that bring back only one or two customers are most frequently taken on near the end of restoration.

As we work on these jobs, we also have crews responding to less urgent community needs and priorities identified by local officials, such as clearing road obstructions that do not imperil public safety.

Customers sometimes ask why they haven’t seen any crews in their neighborhood.

If you haven't seen a crew yet, it's likely that:

  1. We may have to repair a larger issue, such as a transmission line problem, before we can fix a more localized issue like a broken pole. If the bigger job isn’t done first, fixing the smaller problem won’t help
  2. The cause of the outage may be in equipment miles away from your neighborhood

As we receive damage information, we’ll first issue restoration estimates for a broad area or region.

We’ll then refine those into town-by-town estimates. Both types of estimates represent the time of final restoration in the area. Many customers will be restored earlier.