One year ago today, there's a good chance you were sitting in the dark, like hundreds of thousands of other people in Connecticut.
It was this time last year that Tropical Storm Isaias hit the state. The storm itself was pretty bad but it's what it left behind that made it one for the history books.
According to the governor's major disaster declaration - 8,800 trees fell into power lines, and that's not counting ones that fell into yards, streets and homes.
More than 90 state roads were closed, along with hundreds of local streets. The grand total in damages to public infrastructure was an estimated $21 million.
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And for many the most memorable part - 750,000 customers were without power. Some were in the dark for over a week.
It was hot, and we were in the thick of the pandemic, so we couldn't cool off in a movie theater, mall or other public places. The lengthy outages prompted an investigation into Eversource and United Illuminating, and resulted in multi-million dollar proposed fines from the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA).
Many shared their memories of Isaias on our Facebook page.
One year later, what does Eversource have to say about all of this?
They received a lot of complaints about the storm.
PURA fined them $29 million for their slow response and failure to prepare for the storm properly. United Illuminating will also have to pay just over $1 million.
Eversource released a statement Wednesday saying that in the past year, it has improved data functionality, increased system capacity and streamlined response processes.
The company said in part, "We continue working hard to strengthen the system to better withstand the fierce weather we’ve been seeing. While we can’t prevent storms from happening, we understand that customers depend on us to restore power as quickly and safely as possible and we take that responsibility seriously."
Of course, only time will tell how these system improvements really work.
