Residents endure cold night before power restored after wind storm

Mar. 4—Hundreds of homes across Haverhill — in both urban neighborhoods and rural areas — lost power Tuesday due to a windstorm, and some residents had to endure a bitterly cold night before electricity was restored the next day.

Urban areas of the city such as the Acre and rural areas like the Chadwick Pond neighborhood were left without power after strong winds dropped tree limbs onto wires, National Grid company officials said.

Power was restored to many customers Tuesday night, but others had to wait until as late as noon Wednesday, National Grid said. The customers who had to wait faced a cold night without power — a low of 20 degrees and wind gusts up to 32 mph. Temperatures rose to the mid-40s the next day.

National Grid officials said the storm affected many communities and restoration of service was being done as quickly as possible, but could not be completed in just one day due to the high number of repairs needed.

Here's a closer look at the situation in Haverhill, based on details from National Grid:

Nearly 30 customers in the Westland Terrace neighborhood who lost power early Tuesday morning regained it early that evening.

Nearly 200 customers in the Mill Street and Plug Pond areas had service restored by Tuesday night, while about 30 customers in the area of Merrimack Street got power back around the same time.

Other pockets of outages took longer to be restored.

About a dozen customers in the areas of 12th Avenue/Main Street, Hamilton Avenue and Columbia Park, along with pockets of five customers or less on Moore Street, Auburn Street and Arlington Street did not have power restored until midday Wednesday. About 10 customers in the Amesbury Line Road area had power restored around the same time.

On the Bradford side of the Merrimack River, small pockets of customers on Bradford Avenue, South Cogswell Street and Kingsbury Avenue near Chadwick Pond waited until midday Wednesday for power to be restored. About a dozen customers on South Lakeside Road, Lily Pond Road and Barker Street next to Chadwick Pond had power restored by 10 a.m. that day.

National Grid spokesman Robert Kievra said the strong winds persisted for much of Tuesday, creating additional outages and making power restoration difficult.

"As always, the safety of our crews remains our highest priority," he said.

"We have more than 1,800 personnel in New England activated (1,300 in Massachusetts) as part of emergency response operations," he said. "Those crews include overhead line crews, forestry, contractors, underground, damage assessment, transmission, wires down and substation workers."

Across Massachusetts, the storm knocked out power to about 90,883 customers at varying times, according to National Grid.