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Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Utilities chip away at outages

wt110111
Wires still hang low at Ridgewood Drive and Laurel Drive in Millbury today. (MATT WRIGHT)

By Linda Bock TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
lbock@telegram.com

Thousands of National Grid customers remain without power this evening.

At 9:20 p.m., there were about 76,800 in Worcester County without power, down from 100,000 this morning. The count was 17,083 in Worcester, down from about 19,600 at noon.

In Marlboro, 2,223 National Grid customers were without power at 9:20 p.m., down from about 3,600 at noon.

The utility is targeting Thursday evening for restoration of power in all Central Massachusetts communities.

As of 10 p.m., an estimated 1,000 of Unitil's Massachusetts customers lacked electricity, down from about 3,560 at noon. Unitil serves the northern Central Massachusetts communities of Ashby, Fitchburg, Leominster, Lunenburg, Shirley and Townsend.

“We're encouraged by the progress made today toward total restoration,” said Unitil spokesman Alec O'Meara. “Our crews are tackling the diminishing number of trouble spots."

Three of the 10 municipal power companies in Central Massachusetts still had outages as of 6 p.m. Hudson reported 1,240 customers without power, and Boylston, 107. Shrewsbury's utility said 25 customers still lacked power and it expected to get that number down to 10 overnight.