Extra Eversource Crews to Remain on Standby During Nor’easter

As cities and towns across southeastern Massachusetts, the Cape and Islands endure the strong nor’easter forecasted to sit off the coast for the next few days, Eversource is preparing to address expected outages.

The National Weather Service says a powerful ocean storm located about 200 miles southeast of Nantucket will remain through Friday, bringing multiple hazards to the region, including heavy rain, strong northeast winds, coastal flooding, and dangerous seas.

Wind gusts could exceed 60-miles per hour on the coast with gusts up to 40-mph expected inland.  Parts of Massachusetts are forecast to see as much as eight inches of rain.

Eversource spokesman Reid Lamberty tells WBSM News that the energy company will have extra crews on standby, ready to respond to power outages across the area.

“We have staffed some additional crews in the southeastern part of the state and the Cape and Islands in preparation for what our customers could experience – outages to our system or outages to our customers,” said Lamberty.

“In storms like these when we have the rain, and more importantly we’re going to have wind gusts in excess of 60-miles per hour, tree limbs and trees are the number one cause of outages in our system. That’s something we keep in mind and we have crews on standby and at the ready to respond to get power back to any customers affected by this storm.”

Lamberty says the high winds resulted in approximately 800 homes on the Outer Cape losing power Wednesday night.

“Last night we had an incident in Wellfleet, for example, where a tree limb fell on one of our power lines, caused some equipment failure and about 800 customers in Wellfleet were without power.”

NWS says conditions are expected to improve Friday night as the storm finally begins to move away from the region. There could be lingering showers Saturday morning, with conditions drying out throughout the day.

The storm will mostly be felt along the southeastern part of the state with unseasonably cool temperatures expected Thursday and Friday with highs only in the 50s.