Utilities ready for 2013 hurricane season, says Connecticut's governor

Luther Turmelle in the New Haven Register: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy insists that the state’s utilities are ready to handle whatever the 2013 hurricane season dishes out, despite the fact that a Monday night thunderstorm left 21,000 Connecticut Light & Power customers without power.

“Our storm preparations have never been better,” Malloy said Tuesday at the state’s Emergency Operations Center after meeting for more than a half-hour with state utility executives.

The governor said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an active season this year, with between 13 and 20 named storms, with three to six of them possibly becoming major hurricanes.

Malloy and the utility executives said they have dual goals during this hurricane season, which lasts through the end of October: To strengthen the electric grid to prevent loss of service whenever possible and to restore electricity quickly to homes and businesses.

“Last night’s storm was really severe,” said William Quinlan, senior vice president for emergency preparedness at CL&P. “We can’t prevent every outage.”

Mitch Gross, a CL&P spokesman, said the bulk of Monday night’s outages — 17,000 in East Hartford — were the result of two trees taking out a pair of electric circuits. Gross said the circuits “serve as a major distribution channel” that transfer and control large amounts of electricity...

A dark night at Carbon Based headquarters, shot by Brian Thomas, public domain