Residents receive power again just before Christmas Power restored nearly two weeks since storm

From the Eagle Tribune;

Residents receive power again just before Christmas Power restored nearly two weeks since storm
By Margo Sullivan
margosullivan@eagletribune.com

ATKINSON — Twelve days after the ice storm hit, Donna Cloutier's house remained dark.

"Today has just taken a toll on me," she said yesterday, and not just because she faced another day without heat and electricity. Her Christmas Eve tradition was in jeopardy.

The Atkinson log cabin, which she owns with Barbara Fiore, had been dressed for the holiday with a big tree, a snowman and bundles of presents arranged with a decorator's eye. In 24 hours, she had planned to bring her mother down from Maine for the annual get-together with Fiore's family. Everything was ready — except the lights.

"Today, I had enough," she said. "I was on a mission." She planted a sign in the snow in front of her house.

"Day 12, without power," it said. Then she called the town administrator's office.

At 2:32 p.m., as she was telling her story to a reporter, a knock sounded at the door. A crew from Unitil had finally arrived. "I'm a cynical person," she said. "This is because I made all those calls."

But she eagerly ran down the front steps and moved her Toyota out of the crew's way. Cloutier wasn't angry with the linesmen, she assured them. She was fed up with the lack of communication from the company.

"Every time I got in touch with Unitil," Cloutier said she heard the same story.

"The work's done," the customer service representative would say.

"Right," Cloutier would reply. Of course, the work wasn't done.

"Well, we have to fix a circuit."

Finally, Cloutier blew her own fuse.

"There's no flipping circuit," she said. "Everyone's back. All I need is a line to the pole."

The morning after the storm, which left more than 400,000 New Hampshire households without power, the pole at the corner of her house snapped and sent power lines cascading down 400 feet of her driveway.

"We reported it within 15 minutes of its dropping," she said. Unitil warned her to stay away from the wires, but the company didn't send a truck to repair the damage. It was days before she learned she had to hire her own contractor.

Cloutier had tried everything to get a crew over to her house, at one point even flagging down a utility truck. Extra effort didn't help. The crew told her to move along.

The toughest part about the 12 days in the dark was not sleeping at night. She worried about the generator keeping the neighbors awake. She worried about someone stealing it. She worried the power company forgot about her. It was a familiar story for the thousands who remained without power days after their neighbors had their electricity restored.

As day after day passed without electricity, the anxiety mounted for Adria Durkin of Atkinson. Everyone else on her street had power back — except her. She wondered if the power company had forgotten about her house.

Calls three times a day to Unitil brought the same result. She had to tell her story all over again about how the pole went down in her yard Dec. 11, how her electrician came and fixed it Dec. 14, and how the whole rest of the street had lights Dec. 16, and how she was still in the dark.

Unitil said it would be fixed any day now — "hopefully, tomorrow."

But nothing happened.

"I couldn't focus on anything else," she said. "I was so panicky. I thought, I can't go on one more day. But you do."

On Friday, after eight days in the dark, she started e-mailing from work. She contacted newspapers, the governor's office and the U.S. Senate. The governor's office advised her to call the state Public Utilities Commission. The commission called Unitil directly, and the electric company called her back.

"Hopefully, tomorrow," they said. That was the same answer she had received for days.

"I knew I wasn't the only one without power," Durkin said. But even though she reached the governor's office, Sen. Judd Gregg's office and the PUC, she couldn't get a straight answer from her own electric company.

On they way to pick up her son from school, she flagged down a Unitil truck.

"That is the truck that actually showed up," she said. Her power came back Monday between 7:30 and 8 p.m.

"Was it was my persistence with that commission or that I just happened to find a truck?" Durkin said.

At the height of the ice storm, almost the entire town of Atkinson — 2,900 households — was left in darkness. For Pat Goodridge, who lives in Hemlock Heights, the breaking point came Dec. 13.

"I was distraught," she said. "I hadn't eaten for two days, and I was running out of firewood." Goodridge had never in her life gone to a shelter. But that Saturday, she went to the shelter at Hampstead Middle School.

"I was very well taken care of," she said. "But it was stressful."

She kept a diary about her experiences and penned a thank-you letter to Sandra Ouellet and her class.

"I will always remember Hampstead took me in and allowed me to take refuge in Room 202. I slept there," she said. "I was apprehensive. This is a very scary thing. You know, it's not easy living in a shelter when 500 children are going to arrive," but she thought a letter would be important.

Goodridge took some of the teacher's paper, pens and sticky notes for her letter.

The teacher read Goodridge's letter to the class, and pointed out the metaphors and other figures of speech. She told Goodridge that the students usually grumble about writing. But they liked her letter so much, they could not wait to scribble down their own stories about the storm.

Goodridge stayed in the Hampstead shelter until it closed. Then she moved to the Sanborn Regional High School shelter in Kingston. When that shut down Sunday, Goodridge, 70, drove home in white-out conditions. It was that or drive to Londonderry or the Haverhill, Mass., shelter. A neighbor met her at the bottom of the hill near her house. He told her if her car didn't make it, he would push her the rest of the way. Her electricity is back. One zone of her house has heat. Her dogs are still staying at Carol's Grooming.

"I feel guilty," she said.