Bitter freeze brings on darkness

Author: Kelly Janis

On March 8 and 9, an unfavorable brew of heavy winds and freezing rain conspired to coat power lines with ice, topple trees and leave thousands of Vermont homes and businesses cloaked beneath an unwelcome shroud of darkness.

According to Central Vermont Public Service (CVPS) spokesperson Ann Warrell, approximately 20,000 customers were affected by the weekend power outage, 12,000 of whom were without services at its peak. CVPS - which worked around the clock for two days to remedy the situation - was unable to restore electricity to an estimated 500 of these customers until Monday evening.

Addison County suffered a particularly harsh blow in relation to the rest of the state.

"Most of the customers that were affected were in Addison County," Warrell said, citing the heavy concentration of power loss in the 20 towns CVPS designates as its Middlebury District. "And it stands to reason that there were certainly more customers in Addison County than anywhere else which were affected for the duration of the outage."

The event provoked its share of disruptions at the College, which was without power from approximately 4:45 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. on Sunday. The lack of electricity temporarily closed Proctor and The Grille, cancelled the entirety of the day's planned programming on WRMC 91.1 FM, delayed the start of the NESCAC Championship women's hockey game between Colby and Amherst by one hour and caused a number of alarms and elevators to malfunction.

In the wider community, the loss of electricity produced a subsequent loss of profits.

Employees at Steve's Park Diner on Merchant's Row reported that, aside from complaints from customers that they lacked electricity at home, it was business as usual on Sunday morning. Business at the Middlebury Market and Sama's Café on College Street, however, took a significant hit.

"The weather on Saturday killed us to begin with," said café employee Scott Sunderland, referring to inclement conditions which caused temperatures to plunge, made roads slick and, consequently, kept the bulk of customers at bay.

The following day's outage exacerbated the lull. The market - which typically opens its doors at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday - did not begin doing business until 11 a.m. The café, meanwhile, remained closed all day. The latter occurrence was especially problematic in light of the fact that, according to Sunderland, approximately 50 percent of the establishment's revenue originates at the prepared foods counter.

"It definitely affected us," Sunderland said. "It stunk."

"People lost hours, and the money that comes with them," said Middlebury Market employee Bekah Shafer. She added that her father, who owns the Marquis Theater on Main Street, also ran into trouble staging a Sunday afternoon benefit concert for the Addison County Humane Society.

"He couldn't set up for it in the dark," she said.

Although the show went on as planned - albeit with a late start - a number of the band's members were unable to attend. "They live out in the [country] and still didn't have power," Shafer said.

Despite such inevitable inconveniences, Warrell said the CVPS handles each successive outage with greater swiftness and skill.

"We've noticed that storm severity has become a little worse over the last several years," she said. "As a result, we've become much more skilled in preparing for and managing problems."

Vital in so doing, Warrell said, is being armed with appropriate foreknowledge.

"We're more aggressive in watching the weather," she said. "We actually use a meteorological service to track weather patterns. When we know that a storm is coming our way, we look at what sort of winds and precipitation it might contain, and we strategize."

CVPS's efficiency benefits as a result.

"Now, we are able to get people back online more quickly," Warrell said.