Restoration Process

Here at Eversource, we work diligently to keep your lights on. We begin preparing at the threat of severe weather conditions, making sure our equipment inventory is stocked and our employees are ready to respond to outages. We have an advanced, computerized control system that often notifies us of a large power outage.

However, we also rely on public safety agencies, local police and fire departments, and especially our customers to report single or small outages as they occur.

During an outage:

• Our top priority is the safety of the public and our workers. As soon as weather conditions are safe, we locate and monitor any safety hazards in the field, such as downed wires and snapped poles.
• Our crews ensure that downed wires are de-energized in order to keep you and your family safe. At the same time, crews assess whether power is flowing to critical facilities, including hospitals, police and fire stations, water treatment facilities and other establishments that are essential to protecting the safety, health and well-being of the residents of our communities.
• As we assess the damage caused to our distribution system, we begin making repairs and updating customers on our progress. Depending on the severity of the damage, the process can be lengthy.
• In order to restore power to your home or business, we must first repair any damage to our substations. The wires that feed electricity to your home or business are connected to main electric lines, which originate at a substation, so repairing them first is critical to power restoration.
• Once the substations, main electric lines, and wires that feed the street have been repaired, we can begin to restore service to individual homes or businesses. Individual times of restoration will depend on where homes and businesses are located along our system. Ultimately, our crews work street by street to restore power to all customers.